Municipal opportunity radar: building municipal collaboration guidelines for billing - ON-1241

Genre de projet: Recherche
Discipline(s) souhaitée(s): Affaires, Sciences sociales et humaines
Entreprise: Regional Municipality of Durham
Durée du projet: 4 à 6 mois
Date souhaitée de début: Dès que possible
Langue exigée: Anglais
Emplacement(s): ON, Canada
Nombre de postes: 1
Niveau de scolarité désiré: MaîtriseDoctoratRecherche postdoctoraleNouvelle diplômée/nouveau diplômé
Ouvert aux candidatures de personnes inscrites à un établissement à l’extérieur du Canada: No

Au sujet de l’entreprise: 

The Regional Municipality of Durham is one of Ontario’s fastest-growing regions, located immediately east of Toronto and home to approximately 750,000 residents across eight local municipalities: Ajax, Brock, Clarington, Oshawa, Pickering, Scugog, Uxbridge, and Whitby.
Durham Region delivers a wide range of regional services, including public health, paramedic services, long-term care, social services, housing, policing, transportation, waste management, water supply, and wastewater treatment. The Region plays a key role in supporting sustainable growth, economic development, infrastructure investment, and community well-being.
The region combines urban centres, rural communities, agricultural lands, and a significant Lake Ontario waterfront, creating a diverse economic and geographic landscape. Durham is home to major employers in advanced manufacturing, energy, health care, education, logistics, and public service, including Ontario Tech University, Durham College, and Ontario Power Generation.
As one of Canada's leading nuclear energy hubs and a growing centre for innovation and technology, Durham Region is focused on building resilient communities, modernizing public services, and fostering partnerships that improve outcomes for residents and businesses.
Through collaboration, innovation, and strategic planning, Durham Region is committed to addressing the opportunities and challenges associated with rapid population growth while maintaining a high quality of life for its residents.

Veuillez décrire le projet.: 

Municipal governments across Ontario face many of the same billing and payment challenges, yet service improvement and modernization efforts are often pursued independently. As pressures from population growth, fiscal constraints, changing customer expectations, and emerging technologies continue to increase, municipalities have an opportunity to collaborate in ways that accelerate innovation, reduce duplication, and improve service delivery.
This project will focus on developing a Municipal Collaboration Guide that helps municipalities identify, assess, and pursue collaborative opportunities while preserving local autonomy and decision-making authority.
Working with municipal staff and an academic supervisor, the successful candidate will lead a four-month applied research project examining questions such as:
• What opportunities exist for municipal collaboration in billing and payment services?
• What factors enable or hinder successful collaboration?
• How can municipalities identify, prioritize, and scale collaboration opportunities to maximize public value?
• What leading practices can be replicated across the municipal sector?
Project activities may include environmental scanning, jurisdictional research, stakeholder engagement, current-state and leading-practice assessments, revenue process and service delivery reviews, opportunity identification and prioritization, and governance model development.
The primary deliverable will be a practical, implementation-focused guide that outlines collaboration opportunities, governance considerations, assessment frameworks, and actionable recommendations municipalities can use to evaluate and advance shared knowledge and initiatives. The research will provide insights into how municipalities can work together to improve billing and payment experience, leverage emerging technologies, and create scalable approaches that can be adopted across the sector.

Expertise ou compétences exigées: 

Research and Analysis
• Strong research design, with a focus on literature research and qualitative research design
• Ability to gather, evaluate, and synthesize information from multiple sources
• Experience conducting environmental scans, jurisdictional and literature reviews, and leading-practice research
• Strong analytical skills to identify trends, opportunities, and emerging practices
• Critical thinking and problem-solving abilities
Strategic Analysis and Problem Solving
• Experience developing practical frameworks, decision-support tools, or implementation-focused recommendations
• Understanding of organizational, operational, and governance challenges
• Ability to assess opportunities from a strategic and systems-wide perspective
• Ability to translate research findings into actionable insights
• Familiarity with business case development is an asset
Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration
• Strong interpersonal, facilitation and communication skills
• Ability to conduct interviews and facilitate discussions
• Experience working collaboratively with diverse stakeholders
• Ability to summarize complex information for different audiences
• Understanding of collaborative governance and partnership models is an asset
Data Analysis, Knowledge Translation and Visualization
• Experience collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data
• Ability to develop visual summaries
• Understanding of data visualization best practices
• Familiarity with performance measurement and evaluation concepts is an asset