Carolina Benchmarking Project
The North Carolina Benchmarking Project enables municipalities to compare their service and performance trends with other participating units. Partnering municipalities annually submit performance data for their service departments through a Qualtrics survey. The School of Government will receive all data by October. This process generates a large collection of metrics we have traditionally audited manually by comparing submissions to historical data to ensure integrity and accuracy.
For example, sometimes municipalities accidentally add an extra zero to a metric submission, which our team flags. This manual auditing process is prone to human error and is time-consuming, necessitating multiple rounds of review. To address these issues, we aim to streamline and automate the process. Our primary goal in this collaboration is to have an automated way of flagging data that does not align with historical data or comparable municipalities and organizing flagged data points by year, municipality, and service department.
A successful collaboration would enhance accuracy, provide municipalities quicker access to reliable data, and facilitate more responsive changes to improve public service and municipal operations. Additionally, it would enable our Benchmarking team to concentrate on other tasks and offer more support and value to the partnering municipalities.
Some unique challenges associated with this project are the size and scope of the data set you will be working with. Over the past four years, we have collected data from 15 departments within 14 municipalities. This is represented by 873 separate metrics on which we collect data. Also, we want to ensure that there is as little error as possible in the flagging process, so there will be a unique challenge in balancing what is a possible error and what is not. In other words, we want to avoid 70% of the data being flagged from the automation process, but 20-30% is doable for our team to review manually.
Join the team to help solve this problem and improve public service in North Carolina.