Shaun Donovan started using goals as a management tool when he was New York City’s Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development. As the current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he is again seeing how valuable it is to have a limited number of high-priority goals and constantly monitor progress on them.

The focus on achieving a specific outcome-focused goal – whether helping homeowners avoid foreclosure or, together with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, reducing veteran homelessness – is spurring unprecedented cooperation across offices used to operating in silos. But urban families in need of assistance “don’t experience that in silos,” Donovan says. For HUD and its partner agencies, the process of agreeing on a limited set of goals keeps them focused on cracking the toughest housing and urban development problems. And agreeing on common metrics has given them a single language to cooperate – so they can compare apples to apples when measuring success and search for the most effective practices to spread. “Once you’re counting things in the same way … it’s amazing information. Incredible inspiration can come out of that.”

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