At their meeting on February 3rd, Council received the report entitled “Development Approvals Process Update”, for information. The report updates Council on ongoing initiatives to improve the delivery of the City’s development administration services and outlines the next phase of their process improvement project.  

Staff have developed a comprehensive three-year work plan to modernize City DAP service delivery through five coordinated work streams: 

1. Data & Analytics – This work stream will establish key performance indicators for development processes, setting service level targets for each. Additionally, a customer charter will be drafted to define service commitments to the public. Combined, the customer charter and service level framework will provide assurance of long-term transparency and process certainty for customers.  

2. Customer Experience & Service Design – This work stream will work to ensure City services are approachable and accessible, tailored to the familiarity each type of applicant, improving the user experience. This will include optimization of the Gateway unified service center model, along with an expansion of the online self-service permit portal.  

3. Services & Processes – This work stream will continue the optimization of development-related processes, leveraging new opportunities arising from updated City policies and bylaws.  

4. Systems & Technology – This work stream will address software-related shortcomings in current systems through the reimplementation of optimized processes in a modern technology package. This rebuild will be completed with a focus on the customer experience, as defined in the work stream above.  

5. People – This work stream will align city human resources with the new ways of doing business, ensuring sufficient staff capacity with appropriate knowledge levels is available to provide service at each process step. 

Additional information can be found in the full report by City staff.