(62) Toronto Housing Approvals: What’s Changing for Developers? - Jag Sharma - Deputy City Manager - City of Toronto

Gotcha.

So

with that, I want to take a step back.

You have a background as an engineer.

You, I believe, have some specialty in the Lean setup, Six Sigma setup.

And you also have worked with some bigger brand names in your previous life in private sector, including Ford.

I think there was Maple Leafs and other industries.

If you were to, and I think this might be a hard question, if you were to compare the current state of... what we have as an organization in the city in terms of lean and how efficient it's working compared to private sector from one to 10, how would you compare it and how much room to improve do we have?

So it's a little bit tricky because it's not an apples to apples comparison.

To be very transparent, I wish I had my public sector experience before my private sector experience, because the complexity of what happens in the public sector is not something that we can, I'll say, compare directly with the private sector.

Private sector, whether it be Ford or Maple Leaf, it's a product.

It's making sure there's customer satisfaction.

It's ensuring that you are delivering not only profit margin, but the quality product and reducing.

With the public sector, the number of inputs, the number of intersections and everything are so much more complicated.

And so what I wouldn't necessarily be able to do is a direct comparison.

What I will say is just like any organization, private sector or otherwise, there is a great amount of opportunity to improve.

And that's what the team is truly focused on is what we're not doing is comparing against the other municipalities.

What we're doing is comparing against ourselves.

We're setting our benchmark and then we are targeting our improvement.

And once we've actually delivered on that improvement, and this is a conversation I have with industry, whether it be Build, Rescon, or others.

And essentially what we talk about is let's not be shotgun about this.

Let's talk about our top three priorities collectively with their input as well.

And then as I put improvements in for those top three priorities, the validation is through industry and through the feedback that we're receiving.

It's not just self-improvement.

told improvement from a municipal perspective.