Part 7. Proving It Worked Without Bragging About It
Part 7 of 10 in a series on affordable automation for small local governments.
Your pilot has been quietly running for a few months now. Nobody remembers exactly when it started, which, if you read Post 6, was exactly the point. Now you need to do the one thing that feels like it contradicts everything you just accomplished: tell someone about it.
This is where a lot of otherwise well-run pilots go sideways. Having spent two months deliberately not making a big deal out of the automation, the instinct at reporting time is to overcorrect; to walk into a council meeting with a slide that says "Automation Success Story" and a percentage improvement figure that was calculated under some duress the night before. That slide invites exactly the scrutiny the quiet rollout was designed to avoid. Somebody on the council, reasonably, asks how the percentage was calculated. You don't entirely remember. The story stops being about the automation and starts being about the math.
The goal of this post is the boring version of that slide: how to measure what actually happened, honestly, in a form that survives a follow-up question.
Decide What You're Measuring Before You Need The Answer
The biggest reason small-government automation claims fall apart under scrutiny is that nobody picked the metric until after the fact, at which point you're reaching backward for whatever number makes the story work. Pick it at launch instead, ideally the same week you have the "heads-up" conversations from Post 6.
Good metrics for a boring pilot are almost always one of three kinds: time (how long the task used to take versus now), volume (how many of the old manual errors, missed notices, duplicate entries, wrong forms, used to happen per month, versus now), or friction (how many people called or walked in to ask about something the automation now answers on its own). Pick one, maybe two. Resist the urge to also track "resident satisfaction," because you don't have a baseline for it and you're not going to build one for a pilot this size.
Get A Real Baseline, Not A Remembered One
"It used to take forever" is a sentiment, not a baseline. If your clerk estimates the old manual process took "about twenty minutes," that number is probably true in spirit and wrong in specifics. People round the things they dislike doing toward "forever" and the things they're proud of toward "no time at all." If you can, pull three or four real examples from before the pilot: timestamps on an old system, a sampling of a few case files, whatever paper trail exists. Thirty minutes of digging through old records now saves you from a shaky number later.
If no real baseline exists, which happens, especially for the "friction" style metrics. Say so plainly in your eventual report rather than inventing one. "We don't have exact pre-automation numbers, but staff estimated roughly X" is a sentence that survives a follow-up question. A precise-sounding number with no source behind it does not.
Translate The Number Into Something A Council Member Actually Cares About
A council member does not inherently care that a process now takes six minutes instead of twenty-two. They care about what that means in terms they already think in: staff time, cost, or service to residents. Do the translation for them. Fourteen minutes saved, forty times a month, is roughly nine hours of staff time a month. Call it a quarter of a workweek freed up for something else, at whatever that staff member's loaded hourly cost happens to be, often somewhere in the $20–$35/hour range for clerical roles in a town this size. That's a number someone can repeat accurately in a hallway conversation, which is the actual test of whether a number has done its job.
Keep the dollar figure modest and defensible. A pilot that freed up roughly $4,000 to $6,000 a year in staff time is a believable, useful number for a small department. A pilot that claims to have "saved the town $80,000" from a process involving one clerk and one form is a number that will get picked apart, correctly, by the first person who does the arithmetic.
Report It Like A Status Update, Not A Victory Lap
The actual report, to your manager, to the council, wherever it needs to go, should read closer to a maintenance log than a press release. State what changed, what you measured, what the number is, and what you're doing next. One page, plain language, no superlatives. "Since March, the permit-status process has run automatically. We tracked staff time on the old manual version for comparison and estimate it now saves roughly six hours a month, which is being redirected to the backlog of plan reviews" tells the whole story without asking anyone to be impressed.
Counterintuitively, this version gets you more credit, not less. A modest, specific, well-sourced number reads as competence. A dramatic, round number reads as a pitch — and pitches get the skeptical hearing they deserve from people who have sat through a few too many vendor demos themselves.
When The Honest Answer Is "Not Much Yet"
Sometimes the honest report is that the pilot saved some time but not a dramatic amount, or that it surfaced a different problem than expected, or that adoption has been slower than hoped. Say that too. A council that hears an honest "modest win, here's what we learned, here's the adjustment" from you once will trust the next report a great deal more than one that only ever hears triumphant numbers. You are building a track record of successful automation, not just closing out this one.
Your Homework Before the Next Post
Pull whatever real numbers you have on your Post 5/6 pilot, even rough ones, and write the one-paragraph, no-superlatives version of the report described above. If you genuinely cannot find a baseline number, write the honest sentence that says so instead of guessing. Either way, you now have the first page of what will eventually be a very persuasive case for doing more of this.
Next Up: The Second Project — Why Success Makes the Next Choice Harder, Not Easier.
About the Author: Layne Thompson is Senior Vice President at JMA Resources, Inc., where he leads Growth, Innovation, Research, and Development initiatives. With more than 30 years of experience spanning military service, federal leadership, private industry, and local government, he is passionate about helping communities implement practical, cost-effective technology solutions that deliver real results.
Layne previously served as Borough Manager for the Borough of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, from December 2022 through December 2025.
