Actionable Reports with the City of St. Albert, AB, CAN

All right.

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. For our customer interview webinar, we are joined by Anita Johnson, strategic business advisor for The City of St. Albert, who will be giving us an inside look into the city council's strategic planning process and what data they use to drive action. Interviewing Anita will be Ted Jackson, one of Clearpoint Strategies, two founders. The audience will be muted for the duration of this webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions into the Q and A tab. And with that being said, Ted, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks.

Jenna and Anita, welcome. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks for having me. Oh, yeah, Tell me a little bit more about St. Albert and your role there.

You bet. St. Albert's a city with a population of close to 70,000 people. We're located just to the northeast of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. Now, I've been working with the city coming up seven years now, the last two being in my current role as strategic business advisor. And the team I'm on is really responsible for supporting key corporate processes within the organization. And that includes corporate wide strategic planning and reporting. We're also support departments. We support departments in the development of business plans as well as project and change management activities.

Awesome. So tell me about how your city council works and then how corporate business plans interact with them.

Sure. So let's see. Every four years when a new council is elected, the councilors and the mayor will develop a new strategic plan. And that plan outlines what they want to achieve over the four year term. Now, our corporate business plan is also a four year plan. It mirrors that strategic plan and it's broken down into two sections. The first section outlines like priority projects or initiatives that will be undertaken to to really advance that council's strategic plan. And the second contains internal priority initiatives or projects that enable and support the delivery of programs and services to the community.

Okay.

Now all of these are like reported on quarterly and both plans are reviewed and updated every year. So within clearpoint, we've built a corporate business plan scorecard where each initiative is linked to a council priority and internal priority so that we can build reports using the same data set.

Oh, cool. So how did you manage this before clearpoint?

Oh man. Our process was very labor intensive. We used a combination of emails and Excel to collect the information and then build the report in Word. And what that meant is that every quarter the Word document had to be rebuilt. And at one point we tried to use an Excel document like centralize it so everybody could go into it and put their information in, but people kept locking each other like out of it. So really the whole process was a mess, to put it simply.

Yeah. And it sounds like it also took a lot of time to.

Yeah, it really, really did.

So, so how's clearpoint kind of helped solve some of those, those challenges of the Excel and the, and the Word document?

You know, what comes to mind is that it's really reduced our overall time for that process probably by about 75%. So it used to take, I'm going to just like ballpark, 100 hours from end to end process. From sending that initial email to creating that report took a long time and lots of involvement from lots of people and not just the updaters and those of us that were building the report. And now we've kind of streamlined it and it probably takes us about 25 hours for the end to end process combined with everybody together. So it has been like a huge time saver, freeing up a lot of capacity.

Sounds great. I know you said this earlier, so I'm kind of coming back to it a little bit is you have this underlying data set that is doing both your internal reports and your council priorities. Are those dramatically different from each other? Like why are there different priorities kind of than what the council's asking for?

So council, really, the council parties are the ones that are focused on the community and the people in general, whereas the internal ones are those corporate processes like HR or our IT department that really keep the organization running so that we can deliver those things to, to the community. And so the strategic plan has. One has an external focus and then the internal parties are corporate business plan kind of blends both together.

Gotcha. Yeah. So one is very, very much, you know, what your residents are really going to care a lot about. And the other one is how the sausage is made. Like how do you, how do you.

Kind of just keeping your business running.

Right, gotcha. And in your, in your old process, when you were using Word and Excel, were you able to like show progress over time or how did that. Like how.

Not really. I mean it was, once again, it was labor intensive and you really had to know Excel well in order to start pulling that information together and, and building queries and, and really showing, showing that. So you had to have a lot of technical knowledge. Whereas with clearpoint we enter it in and we run a report.

That sounds pretty easy.

Yeah.

Not to sell clearpoint that much, but tell me a little bit about how you do decision making in the city. How are you actually using the reports? How Are you driving that part forward?

Okay, so when the reports are generated, we have to publish them to the community as well. So the, especially the council priorities. And so as we're pushing that information out to the community, the community will come back and ask us questions or we'll look at how progress is happening over time and we'll make decisions as to what best to deliver. And the nice thing about seeing that sequential periods, like multiple periods at a time is that you can see the progression of the project so that you can make those evidence based decisions.

Okay, great. Does the council ever change their priorities or do you just need to worry about it once every four years?

Oh, no, they. Every year the, both the strategic plan and the corporate business plan is reviewed and things will be updated so that when emergent issues come along, we're able to address those, those the latest and greatest things that are happening within the city.

Okay, cool. So it sounds pretty, pretty dynamic.

Yeah, yeah. So every year we're going into clearpoint and we're retiring some projects and creating new ones or we're extending time frames for others.

Awesome. Are you doing anything else with clearpoint? Anything kind of new and different?

Yeah, we're, you know, there's a few other things that we're doing with clearpoint where we put together a dashboard on the website that, that's currently under development at the moment. But the, the graphs that are within that dashboard, as you will, it's sort of like a list of the different services that we have and some metrics that go along with it. But those graphs are in. That data comes from clearpoint. So we've got this web connection between the two. So that as soon as we enter data in clearpoint, the graphs are automatically updated in the website, which our IT department absolutely loves because they don't have to do this manual maintenance of us sending them a graph and then having to upload it.

That's great. So we got a question from, from the audience where it kind of goes back right before I. My question. So I'm going to take us back just a little bit. You were talking earlier about the problems with Excel and getting locked out kind of prior to Clearpoint. So now in Clearpoint, how does, how does access work is regarding staff going in, providing updates. You provide like view only access to the board or are they just getting exported reports? How do you think about who gets access to clearpoint?

It all depends on what information the person requires. So we give. We all have, let me think about this. We all have single sign on capabilities so we go to a specific place on our corporate website to click in and as long as you're like entered and have, have some kind of license, you go right into clearpoint. You don't even have to worry about passwords, you just jump right in. And then we determine if you're just updating things for a report or if you need to view things to make decisions, basically what, what range, how we're going to assign your license. And we do have some of our directors that have scorecard capabilities, which means that they're a viewer in one, they're a brow. Sorry, they're a browser in one, they're an updater in another and they're an administrator in another. So it allows that flexibility based on what they need to see and decisions that they need to make.

Okay, that sounds pretty straightforward. Tell me a little bit about how you use clearpoint for tracking your service level inventory.

You bet.

Maybe even describe what that is for people. Because we do have a, we have a lot of people from local government that might have a full understanding of it, but then some people outside of local government that are interested in performance management in general.

So our service level inventory is basically used to set the direction on how business planning, budgeting and the delivery of services is going to take place in the city. So we've got this huge library that kind of outlines all the different services that we provide, from public works to it across the board. And we actually have two inventories as well, an internal and an external, similar to the corporate business plan and the strategic, strategic plan. Anything that we consider external or needs to be council approved. And then anything that's internal, which is once again, you know, the operations of the business is approved by our executive leadership. But the inventory is stored within clearpoint. And every year when we go and approach departments to see if any of these services need to change or if council makes a decision throughout the year, where they've made a council motion that a service needs to change, the inventory gets updated and a report gets spit out at the end of the year to show what those changes were so that council and the executive leadership can approve those. The changes to the service level inventory.

Cool. It sounds like a great way to keep everything right in one place.

Yeah. And it keeps everything on track so that we can jump in at any time to see what the previous service level was and then what the change was.

And is that related to your budget? Like, do you like if the council wants to do more things or they want to do less things?

Yeah, everything Relates for budget. Right. We're actually in the process of developing priority based budgeting within the organization and tying it to that service level inventory. So having that within clearpoint as well, it's a really great way to show what we're doing and discuss what needs to stop if we're going to start doing something else and not like increase the budget.

Okay, great. And so when you think about it, sounds like the service level inventory is updated every year, Council comes in every four years. You have a five year plan overall. Like how do these things, how do they work in. If we ignore clearpoint for a second, how do they work just in general with overlap and then how is Clearpoint helpful in managing that frequency?

So we have several 10 year plans that have been developed. Our municipal development plan is a 10 year plan and that informs a lot of the decision making and the end to end, like what we do for our services. We also have the corporate, as you said, we have the strategic plan from council, we have the corporate business plan and we also have what we call mid range department plans. And these mid range department plans, the reason they're called mid range because they're five years is, is because they're midway between that like 10 year long term plan. But we've also called them integrated plans and we've called them all sorts of other things, but really they're a department business plan. And so each of those kind of feed up into each other to make sure that everything's aligned before we go forward and do our services and our reporting and really tracking our measures as well. So we've just started working with departments on their mid range plans. Some of them are done, others are in development. But we're hoping by the end of the year that all of our departments will be done their mid range plans. And once all these mid range plans are done, they're uploaded into clearpoint and scorecards created for them and we track their initiatives. Not just their initiatives, but also any initiatives that they're responsible for in any of the other plans, all in one place.

It sounds very, very integrated. It sounds integrated, which is great. Did you have any challenges getting buy in with departments? One just, it sounds like this is like, let me step back, how long has this been going on at St. Albert's like if you, if you've been working there for a while, is this process kind of natural? And then how did you get buy in to do it in an application like Clearpoint?

Yeah, it definitely isn't natural. People are used to just focusing on the Tactics or the projects and not seeing how everything aligns together. Everybody always wants to see like all the projects together, but there's been a lot of things that are just naturally disjointed. Right. So this gives us a clear line of sight and it has taken some time and, and we, we continue to work with departments to, to get these plans done. But what's really interesting is even though we get resistance as we're, we're going through it, once it's done, they're all like, oh, now I see what you're doing. Oh, and now we can grab that and oh, now we can see this. And so sometimes the realization is afterwards but then it helps us with other departments. So like the excitement kind of builds as we go and more people come on board as we show them what we're doing with it.

Right, great. So this discussion sparked a lot of questions online.

Yeah.

So I'm going to, I'm going to throw several at you and then let you choose how you want to answer. I think, I think we've answered some of these just in the discussion. One is, you know, how difficult was it to integrate the short and long term plans? You were just talking about that and you know, did you develop any kind of process map to illustrate the integrations and can you share anything that shows how these things work together? So like all three of these I'm just going to throw at you and let you choose what you would want to share and talk about.

So the process map, we have process maps for the actual mid range business plan process that we've designed that's kind of out, that's not technical with clearpoint, but I can show you how things are integrated within clearpoint right now. So I'm just going to log into the system here, let me share, share my screen, make sure I'm sharing the right one. So all of our plans are scorecards. We, we've renamed to Plans. The corporate business plan is our main one and underneath the corporate business plan we do have the service level inventory and we actually have a few other projects that we've done in the past where we've wanted to capture information and produce a report. So they're just like one off little things that, that we've done in Clearpoint as well. And then all of these down here are our business plans or the ones that we're developing for different departments. And the wonderful thing about this one, and I'm just going to see if I can find my direct link to it. Here it is. Give it A second. My system is just a little bit slow. What I'm trying to show is a report.

No, it's not going to do it.

Let's go back to the corporate business plan and we're going to go down to planning and development and active reports. This is the line. So this is a Gantt chart for the planning and development department and it shows all the different initiatives that they're part of as part of the corporate business plan, as well as all their projects that they have developed over the next five years. So we're able to see everywhere that they have to do do work. And they even put some additional core work in here. One thing that we haven't done yet, which we are looking forward to doing towards the end of this year, is actually adding in other department initiatives where there's a shared responsibility so that they can see what they're working on with other groups as well. And what I like about the reporting here is when you edit the report, you can actually find all those different plans and choose which other departments you want to pull in. Especially if maybe some don't work together or if there's multiple departments that work together.

That seems great. It seems like a great way to get kind of alignment across the organization. And even I think you were talking about it before, some buy in for how people are able to see the value of what you're asking them to do, which is kind of manage your plan. But then you can see how it, how it links into the.

And once we have all the departments kind of linked together and with the corporate business plan, El can even the executive leadership can even be able to see where the capacity is happening within the organization. It's that bird's eye view that everybody is looking for.

And do you build the executive leadership a particular report or do you find them kind of navigating through everything in the tool?

We're still teaching them right now. So it's just information like separate reports at the moment. But our vision is for them to eventually have a dashboard in here that they can use that.

Yeah, that's what we see a lot. So organizations like yours that are putting in, you know, everything, you know, like the service level inventory, the multiple levels of plans that for. For either leaders or people just working in single plans, we're seeing organizations bookmarking pages or we say setting home pages just for the particular individuals. So it's like you can see everything. But when you log in, it's going to take you to just what you need to go from there.

And I know that clearpoint has a new graphic user interface, but we're still using the old one at the moment. Some of us are still are testing that new graphic user interface and we're putting together a project to roll that out to the organization. And I think once that comes out that there and with, especially with the buy in that we're getting now within the organization, I think that's going to like elevate things even more.

That sounds great. So we only have a few minutes left. Tell me what you just talked about. One thing. Anything else you're looking at for the future of clearpoint for you, for your.

Yeah, I mean we're developing a corporate risk registry this year that we're hoping to have integrated into clearpoint by the end of the year. We're looking to improve our dash, not our dashboard, our statistics on the website. We're working on some change management activities. Anything really that requires planning and delivery, we're integrating into clearpoint. So it's been a great tool to show people where we're at and where we're headed.

And what do you mean by like a corporate risk registry? Like how would that.

So the corporate risk registry, part of our mid range business planning process has a section where organize like the departments will focus on what the risks are in delivering their, their business plan. And so we add that into clearpoint and then we take all of those and we compile them from all the different plans. So we have pulled a report that takes the risks from all the plans that have been developed so far and then we build that corporate risk registry off of that.

So if it's like we have a risk of not having enough staff or if inflation outpaces our budget, you can see that people have identified the impact of this one risk item across your.

Entire strategy across all the different departments and especially you'll start seeing where there's similarities between the departments so that you can see if all the departments are having that same risk. You can address that one and figure out how to address that one.

That's great. That's a great way to get synergy kind of across the organization. So what would you tell someone who might be watching in today? What you're showing at one level is like wow, the all inclusive management machine. And it another level it's like this is so overwhelming. Like how do you get started? How do you get started in clearpoint?

It's you just start with one, start with one plan and then just continue to build off of that. And that's really how we started, we started with just one thing and then as we were discovering things within the organization, we saw how clearpoint would help us. But really you're going to love how much time it's going to save you. And bringing those links, like easily linking those plans together for reporting was a real game changer. And yes, I'm sure it could be done in Excel, but super labor intensive, whereas clearpoint has like automated and streamlined that process and it's really going to improve the quality of your reporting and really it'll save you money in the end too.

Right. One last quick question. I do appreciate the compliments there that just came in is you mentioned this, but I think we, you might have just been using, using some, I'll say, inside baseball words, which is, you know, is the information for internal purposes like you to manage internally, you to report to your, your council or are you putting it on a public dashboard? I know you talked about this a little bit, so I just wanted to kind of.

And there is one thing that I forgot to mention is with the council strategic priority, one of the things that we're working on right now with them is determining their measures for their projects. So once those measures are determined, that dashboard or the website that I was talking about that has all our stats is going to be restructured based so that the community can see what those measures are for those council strategic priorities. So we're using things internally as well as externally to make, to make decisions and keep people informed.

Right. Well, that's great. Anita. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I, you know, I've been to St. Albert's and seeing what y' all have done there. It's very, very impressive and I greatly appreciate you sharing all your success with us.

You bet. It was nice to be here.

All right, have a great day.

Thanks everybody too.