The City of Jacksonville Advances to Jacksonville Lean Consortium Gold Membership
The City of Jacksonville Advances to Jacksonville Lean Consortium (“LeanJax”) Gold Membership
The City of Jacksonville (COJ) has advanced to Gold (Enterprise-Wide) 🥇, the top tier of membership in the Jacksonville Lean Consortium — a milestone that reflects a real commitment to continuous improvement!
Gold is the deepest level of commitment an organization can make to this work, and COJ has stepped up to it. The organizations that get the most out of Lean — in the public sector or the private — tend to get the same three things right: purpose, process, and people. COJ has gotten all three right.
Purpose
COJ chose a clear true north. Through the 904 LEAN initiative, the work is anchored to a simple question: does this make things better for the people we serve and the people who do the serving? That clarity of purpose is what separates a genuine transformation from a collection of projects. When the aim is resident value, the work compounds, building momentum that carries from one win to the next.
Process
COJ has backed its intentions with real process work; training people across departments, carrying projects through to measurable results, and recovering hundreds of thousands of hours once lost to waste.
Those recovered hours are the part outsiders underestimate. In government, time is money; not the kind we write checks for, but the most valuable resource any public body has. COJ made a smart bet: invest an hour now to save many more later. And every hour returned goes back where it belongs: to shorter waits, timely answers, and better service for Jacksonville residents.
People
Tools don’t sustain excellence. People do. Ideal results require ideal behaviors, and behaviors only take root in a culture that supports them; one built on respect for every individual and the humility to find the best idea no matter who offers it.
That’s the work COJ is doing now; not just running events, but building the daily habits that make improvement self-sustaining long after any single project ends. That’s the difference between an initiative and a transformation, and it’s why this step matters.
Gold Membership
Gold is the highest tier of LeanJax membership, and stepping up to it is a statement of commitment. It gives COJ a genuine partnership rather than a training subscription: hands-on coaching and Kaizen support, strategy deployment that ties improvement work directly to the outcomes residents feel, and a Lean Transformation Assessment that maps where the next gains will come from.
It also opens the widest door to the LeanJax community — peer learning, benchmarking visits, and national partners — so the city’s improvement teams have the support to go further, faster.
Selecting this level says COJ intends to make continuous improvement part of how the city works, not a one-time project.
The Leadership Behind It
This kind of progress requires leadership at every level. Mayor Donna Deegan and Wanyonyi Kendrick, the COJ’s Chief Information Officer, have championed this initiative from the start, and Jorge Peralta Munoz (“Alex”), the Lean Initiatives Program Manager, has been the driving force behind its success.
A special thank you as well to Dan Bracewell, whose work bridging Jacksonville’s Lean community with the COJ’s leaders helped make this partnership possible. Connections like the one Dan built are how a community of practice grows.
A Win for the Whole Community
When a local government serving more than a million residents commits to continuous improvement at this level, it raises the bar for everyone on the First Coast. COJ is setting the pace, and the Jacksonville Lean Consortium is proud to partner with them on the journey.
Congratulations to the City of Jacksonville for committing to this work at the highest level; this is a real investment in the people they serve, and it’s only the beginning.
Curious what LeanJax membership could look like for your organization — public sector or private?
Questions / Membership
James Bussell
Executive Director, Jacksonville Lean Consortium
📱 904-742-2547 (call or text)