Implementation Phases & Steps

Prosecutorial Performance Indicators

PHASE

STEP

ACTIVITIES

PLANNING

Anticipating Challenges

Prepare to address political, cultural, and logistical challenges to PPI implementation.
Identify potential PPI allies and skeptics within and outside your office.
Hold meetings with select staff and external partners for the explicit purpose of discussing PPIs and the potential impact of implementing the PPIs for their work.

Examine current clerical/IT/analytical capacity for entering, extracting, linking, managing, and analyzing data.
Explore research partnership opportunities with local universities.
Assign a senior executive to be responsible for overseeing PPI implementation.
Identify prosecutors who have an interest in using data, and prepare them to serve as data ambassadors.
Understand how staff currently use data at each level of your office.

Identify all internal and external data sources.
Assess data elements readily available from your case management system, human resources department, victim advocates, and other criminal justice agencies or specialized task forces.
Evaluate which PPIs can be measured using data currently available to you.
Understand what new data can be collected internally or requested externally to measure additional PPIs.

TESTING

Introduce and explain the PPI framework office-wide.
With help from data ambassadors, foster an office culture of data use.
Develop a roll-out strategy that is time-bound and explicit about staff roles and responsibilities during implementation.
Manage your expectations about buy-in among staff but be persistent about garnering support for the initiative.

Gather baseline data for as many PPIs as is feasible.
Assess how meaningful each indicator is to your office while considering your goals and priorities.
Select a group of PPIs across the nine objectives to adopt based on the quality of data and the usefulness of the information.
Determine formats for presenting PPIs to management versus external government and community stakeholders.
Establish baseline data for each PPI from which change will be measured

Coach executive and mid-level management to understand PPI trends, notice red flags, ask questions, seek additional information, identify possible solutions, and improve data entry practices.
Evaluate and meet training needs for your clerical, IT, and data staff.
Recruit and train researchers and/or IT specialists to grow your office capacity for collecting and analyzing data.

APPLICATION

Collect, clean, and analyze the PPI data on monthly, quarterly, and/or annual bases.
Present this information in data dashboards, spreadsheets, or charts and graphs.
Routinize and automatize the process of data extraction, analysis, and presentation.
Establish data quality control mechanisms.
Plan to collect new data not currently available to measure additional PPIs.

Hold monthly or quarterly meetings to digest PPI data based on analysis of time trends and comparison across office units.
Request additional data from your IT/data staff to answer follow-up questions that arise from these meetings.
Consult with your staff and external stakeholders to understand changes in trends.
Link findings to specific policies, practices, and office structure.
Highlight instances where the office is succeeding and acknowledge those who contributed to positive changes.

Engage with policy and research experts to develop strategies to improve performance.
Prioritize which issues to address based on the feasibility and impact of solutions.
Delegate strategy implementation to a staff member or task force, and monitor execution.
Communicate new policies internally.
Discuss the benefits of this work with community groups.
Monitor data trends to evaluate improvement over time.