City Profile: Denver, CO
Investing in Staff
Denver has been running its celebrated Peak Academy program since 2012, teaching nearly 6,500 city employees to make small changes in their daily work that will make a big difference over time. Employees have gone on to save the City more than $20 million and generate more than 2,500 innovations that create efficiencies, enhance government, and improve life for residents.
What Works Cities partner the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University worked with Denver to improve staff’s data analysis capabilities. Together, they developed and launched a new Peak Academy course focused on introducing analytics concepts to employees unfamiliar with using data, as well as an advanced analytics course targeting employees with existing data skills who wanted to accelerate their capability beyond basic spreadsheets and databases. Denver now offers the courses to employees from across the City who can apply what they learn to deliver services in a more targeted way and make better, more data-driven decisions about where to provide resources. Denver also worked with BIT to learn behavioral science techniques and teach others the tools.
The above profile is an excerpt from “What Works Cities: How Local Governments Are Changing Lives,” a new report showcasing accomplishments from cities participating in the What Works Cities initiative over the past two years. Read more profiles and city success stories here.
