Award-Winning Innovation: Durham’s Community-First Approach to Strategic Planning

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. The topic for today's webinar is award winning Durham's community First approach to strategic Planning. We're excited to welcome Pat Maday, Strategic Initiatives Manager for Durham County, North Carolina and Ted Jackson, clearpoint Strategy Co founder. The audience will be muted for the duration of the webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions in the Q and A tab for Pat and Ted. So without further delay, we'll go ahead and get things started.

Great. Thanks, Megan. And thank you, Pat, for joining us. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and, and your history with Durham County.

Sure. Good morning to you and to everybody who's on. Thanks for having me. So I'm Pat Ma. I'm the Strategic Initiatives Manager at Durham county and I've been with the county for about two years now. Coming on two, I've been in the public sector bouncing around state and local government for about 13 years, 10 in North Carolina and in Durham County I'm in the Office of Strategy and Performance. So we are a team of five. So we have a director, I'm the manager, and then we have two strategy analysts and a data analyst. And we've been working in clearpoint for quite a long time here.

Excellent. So why don't you, let's just jump right in. Why don't you tell us about the state of performance management in Durham County.

Yeah. So we've got a pretty long history with performance management. We had a previous strategic plan and a framework called Managing for Results that kind of guided how everybody used performance management performance measures here. So a couple of years ago there was a leadership change in the county and our office was created. So previously performance management was housed in the budget office and strategic planning was housed in the manager's office. So the decision was made to combine them into one team strategy and performance. So we took a look at clearpoint and basically found that it was a good natural time to get the lay of the land and look at how people are using clearpoint, what we've got in there. And concurrent with the development of a new strategic plan, how we can maybe streamline things and modernize it a little bit for everybody that's using it today. So I'm going to share a couple things which you said is okay and let's go ahead and get this up and share that. Share this little dashboard here which you should be seeing. So I went into our clearpoint and just took a look at how many measures we had in there. Who's updating them when they're being updated, all that kind of stuff. And I basically exported a bunch of spreadsheets, came up with this little dashboard in Power bi. So the key things that this told us was that we had almost 700 measures in Clearpoint, which is a lot very unwieldy in some senses when you're looking at when they were updated last. We had about 276 of them updated within the last two years. And I have to note, this was as of December 31, 2023. So this is now kind of outdated. But this was just a snapshot in time of how people are using it. So about 40% were kept up to date. We had 66, which were pretty much titles with no data. So that told us people had a lot of cool ideas for measures. Maybe they were tracking them on their own, or maybe they never got around to tracking them. And then we just had a lot of measures which had been input, had some data updated at some point, but never really ended up being followed through with. Another key insight here is we were able to look by department and see who was using them. So I always like to point out our Justice Services Department, who gets the gold Star. They had 100 plus of the almost 700 measures, and they actually kept over 80 of them up to date, which was really cool. So they were using this not just for strategic plan stuff and core work. They were really using the system. So it's nice to see we gave departments the opportunity to go and put whatever they wanted in here and use it. So all this to say we found that there was a, you know, relatively small percentage of measures that were kept up to date, and that was maybe the natural number that we want to go with in the future. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is just information we're using to figure out what we're going to do next.

Hey, Pat, how do you decide what's an efficiency measure or an output measure? I'm watching this.

Oh, yeah, a big pipeline with something in our new strategic plan. And then we really would like to target measures that do both. So it's like telling the story of your core work, and it's actually aligned directly to the plan as well. It's okay if a measure doesn't fall in the middle there, because we've just got some important core work that we have to communicate out, but it's not necessarily a big priority because we're doing it well already and we don't have to focus on it too much. And then also, in that big department measure bucket, for instance, if there's a department that wants a hundred measures in clearpoint, maybe a small handful of them are going to be in these yellow, blue, green circles, but they can have a lot of other stuff there that just won't rise to this level here.

And when you talk to people, do you say all of your measures need to be in clearpoint? You know, like, is that the world or is there? Then we also have some additional measures that are outside of clearpoint. Like how do you. How do you think about that?

It's a great question. In an ideal world, we'd get everything in Clearpoint. I think what we found here is we maybe went a little too far there and had a. We had 700 and people weren't updating them. So that's not to say that the information is not updated or accessible, it's just kind of housed somewhere else. So going forward, we're trying to really focus in and use clearpoint as the tool to communicate those important, focused measures.

Very cool.

And then just showing a little bit of our, our actual clearpoint system. This is our current homepage, so this is our legacy previous strategic plans. You've got five goals here. You' got the departments listed underneath and then you could click into the departments, you've got their activities, which is usually something like a program or a division or something like that, and then you've got their measures. So what we've been building out now, with the help of a couple of your team members over there, is our new strategic plan. So we've got a new little homepage that we're building out. And then when you go over to the elements which are up here, click that really quick. We started to build out our new strategic plan focus areas. So these are what were previously called goals. We're referring them to them as focus areas now. So regional leadership, healthy community, etc. And then we've built in our objectives and 74 initiatives and then each initiative is going to have ideally one to three measures. So we're still copying those over. So you don't see the huge number yet, but we're probably going to end up somewhere around 200 or so. But we're in the process of copying relevant stuff over, archiving old stuff, putting new measures in and all of that stuff. And then the other thing we're doing right now, I mentioned budget book measures, so I think we have to go over to measures here. Actually, I think I've got it up already. Yep. So we've been assisted with coming up with a template. So previously with the budget book, we were just taking screenshots, kind of like hard keying text in word and merging it. So we figured out that with clearpoint we can tag the budget book measures or select them and then automate a little page so we can change the colors, have it aligned with the brand of the budget book. And then we can basically pull in charts, narrative, all sorts of this stuff. And these boxes I'm pulling in are actually new little fields we set up. So we want to keep all of the historical information. But we said for the budget book, give us one to five sentences of narrative, keep it focused so we can keep it more consistent across all the departments. So this was really easy to put together. And then we're going to come up with something like this for all of the departments, export it, hand it over to budget and they can merge it into their book.

That's awesome. So that's a good way to capture, to let people know that you can capture, you know, both your budget measures and your strategic measures together. So we did get a question which was how are your departments tracking measures outside of clearpoint and do you manage any of those or departments self manage them? So are they managed kind of in your organization or are they kind of managed within the departments?

Yeah, I think measures as a whole are pretty much managed in departments right now. So what we're really guiding departments on are those budget book and strategic plan measures. So those are the one that we're. Those are the ones, sorry, that we're vetting, making sure that the narrative is good, the charts look good, all of that stuff. So we're guiding the more public facing stuff that's going to end up in documents, in our eventual dashboard online, that kind of stuff. We're always happy to consult with departments and assist them with their measures, but at this moment the just usual data they're collecting is handled by them.

Gotcha. It seems like what you've done in the last year, even less than a year, is a lot of change. You know, it's one thing to tell people they're not using measures and just we're not going to track them, but it's another thing to kind of completely do some wholesale changes, not only in the tool they're working in, but the way with the overall processes. Like how did the agencies take it? How did you, how were you able to drive that change in the organization?

Yeah, honestly, we haven't had much pushback from departments. In a sense they're actually kind of happy that they have fewer measures and a more focused number of measures to keep up with. So it's been helpful to be communicative with them. Just make sure along the way we're keeping them up to date. I think asking their feedback was a big help. And it's also been really helpful to have support for management. So we've been meeting with them closely and keeping them up to date with our plans, getting approval for that kind of stuff. So it's helpful both on our end to build relationships with departments and make sure they know that we're partnering with them. We're not just telling them to do things, but we're here to help and consult with them. It's also helpful for us collectively to get that vision and directive for management, like, hey, this is where we're moving to. And also communicating the why is a big thing. So we're not just suddenly shooting an email out to departments, like, hey, you're doing this now. Like, we're making sure to hold meetings, trainings, open houses, that kind of stuff, so they can come in, ask questions. And we're really trying to put a message out that we're all in it together. We're not just trying to be the experts here and tell them what to do. We're trying to, like, make this a big effort where we're joining together to move the county in the right direction, in a more efficient direction.

Yeah, we've seen it across so many of our clients who, when you try to tell somebody what they should measure, you get very low compliance. But when you ask them, when you show them kind of the strategy and ask them how they contribute and let them kind of partner with you on the measures, I think was the right way that you said it. There's a lot more involvement and enthusiasm for what you're measuring.

Yeah, and there are some tough conversations, too. So as we've been working with departments on business plans, tying what they do to the new strategic plan, we've kind of let them lead the conversation, like, hey, here's this new initiative. We think you might be the lead on it, or you maybe they said they want to be the lead on it, so how are you going to measure it? And then they'll throw out some ideas, and then we're here to help kind of shape and mold it. So you asked about, you know, output versus efficiency measures before. We're trying to get away from output as much as possible and actually look at more meaningful things. So if we get a measure that's just kind of counting something. We want to try to help them think a little bit further down the line. Like, you know what, in what context are you counting those things? Like, can we take it further and look at an efficiency or an outcome or something like that? So we're, we're really letting them come up with a lot of the ideas, but we're here to help guide to make sure measures are consistent across the county and that they're actually telling a story meaningful to someone in the community or management. I think my light just went off. I sit still too long. That sensor doesn't give me much time, but.

Right, okay. I have a couple of rapid fire questions that I want to move on to your new strategic plan. So, so you showed the budget book measures like, like how do you think about separating them the strategic measures and the budget book measures? And do you do that in a, in a particular way in Clearpoint, or is there also just kind of education to, to, to the people in departments about how to get to that sweet spot?

That's a very good question. So right now we're focused. So we, we did these business plans. We were working on these strategic plan measures and then just based on timelines and the budget process occurring now, we pivoted a little bit to focus more on the core work and budget book measures. So as we've worked with them, we went out to departments and said, hey, we want two to four good measures that tell the story of what your department's doing. And that, that was kind of the broad thing. And we're like, hey, if, if you can tie them to the new strategic plan, that's, that's a bonus. Some people might not be that far along yet, but we're really trying to get them to think of, you know, especially in the big departments, like, what are some things that broadly tell the community what you do? And if you can tie that to something that we're trying to accomplish between now and 2029, which is the timeline of our strategic plan, it's even better.

Right, okay. And then second one is. So I'll just read it. It's from, from Ronnie. It says, what process do you all follow for reporting the ongoing performance of these measures and who's typically involved? So for example, do you meet with county leaders on some kind of frequency to talk to talk through the progress?

This is a good question. We're not there yet with the new plan, but previously we did the usual quarterly email to departments or quarterly call and just say, hey, we'd like to get your Data updated. Now it's a little bit different because of the timeline of the budget process. So we basically at this point came to them in December asking them to identify those measures and then got that list of measures. And then over the last couple of months we've asked them to update their Data through quarter two, which is December 31st for us. So basically this is like a one time, have it updated for halfway through the year. Going forward, we're probably going to go back to a quarterly sort of system. Not all measures are quarterly. That's okay. But it's just, hey, give us whatever the most recent data you have is. And then eventually, yeah, we would like to make it conversational. So I know they have stat systems out there. So we've talked about internally maybe setting something up where we're meeting with departments, leadership and talking through stuff. A big key here is that we don't want this to be a punitive system because that just doesn't work or that's our philosophy at least is that we want to make it more conversational and talk to people about their hurdles and what we, leadership, everybody, collaboration with other departments can do to get over that hurdle. So that's a really key thing and that's a trust building thing we're trying to do. And it's a, it's a big cultural change too. So that's something that's going to be incremental and we've got to model it. Right.

Awesome. So I know you just came up with your 2025-2029 strategic plan. Tell me a little bit about how you refreshed your strategy overall.

Sure. So like I mentioned, this office is about to maybe a little over two years old now. So we were tasked with is, you could call it a refresh, you could call it a new plan. It's like some, some stuff carried over, some didn't. But for the purposes of this, we'll call it a new plan. But basically, I think first off, this is a little bit before I got here, but the team did some consultations with leadership to both elected leadership and, you know, executive management and determine the broad structure of the plan. So previously there were five goals. The plan is now kind of organized in seven focus areas and there are a few reasons for that. One of them is that it matched the executive structure that we had. And it's also just looking at the, the way we organize things and what buckets they fell into. We felt that seven was a good way to go. We also changed the terminology from goals to Focus areas. And our director likes to say that that's because with a goal, you sometimes have that thought that, like, you can reach it and it ends, but we'd rather talk about it as something that you're focusing on. And it's an ongoing process. Like, you never really hit the end or there's gonna be some things in the strategic plan you complete. And you're like, hey, we implemented that program. It's ongoing, but we want people to be thinking through, like, how you can continuously improve it. So, so that gave us the broad structure, and then we did a lot of engagement. So we went out to departments and did SWAT exercises. So if anyone's not familiar, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, we engaged with leadership teams. Then we went out to employees themselves and did a big survey. So we wanted employees to comment on the new structure, what their priorities were. We also went out and talked to residents. We did a big resident survey, and then we did iterative engagement along the way. So we did this first resident survey, got their big priorities. We also collected demographic information because it was important for us to know who we were hearing from in the community where we were hearing from, that kind of stuff. And once we had that and knew our gaps, we did a round two where we did some in person engagement. So for air, for instance, we heard a little bit less from North Durham. So we went up to the library and to a couple of community groups and talked to them. Our analysts did a great job at doing some tabling, going to some churches and just doing a bunch of different things, trying to make sure we talked to as many people as possible and that it didn't all happen in one week. We were kind of flexible and dynamic to make sure we were spending our time talking to who we hadn't heard from yet. And then took all that information, synthesized it, presented it to the board, and came up with a plan everybody was relatively happy with and got adopted back in July.

That sounds awesome. It sounds like a great way to. You know, I was worried listening in the beginning. I was like, oh, is this just who's on email or who's on social media? But looking at where you're getting your responses and really going out in the field to try to make sure you get responses, kind of the. The broad community approach is really nice.

Yep. Yeah, there's a quote I like. It's, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. So we spent a lot of time out there actively listening, talking to people and making sure we were hearing them and, and that this Plan reflected their wants and needs. So it wasn't us just coming up with a bunch of objectives and stuff. Like everything in here was crafted from the information we got from people.

What were some of the big things that you heard and was it consistent kind of across your populations?

Yeah, it's a good question. So interestingly we, we did this survey and we had them rate the focus areas, but we also had open ended questions about what they want to see the county accomplish, what's most important to them. So the two things that rose to the top, which aren't super surprising were like planning, development and infrastructure. So we kind of looped that into one bucket. A lot of comments about Durham's growing very quickly. We want to make sure that our infrastructure can handle everybody moving in, you know, that kind of stuff. And then number two, which kind of goes hand in hand with it, was affordable housing. So rents are going up, prices are going up. We're doing a lot of building in Durham, but we're in a really great region. We're in the research triangle. So we've also got automation we got from people.

What were some of the big things that you heard? Was it consistent kind of across your populations?

Yeah, it's a good question. So interestingly we, we did this survey and we had them rate the focus areas, but we also had open ended questions about what they want to see the county accomplish, what's most important to them. So the two things that rose to the top which aren't super surprising were like planning, development and infrastructure. So we kind of looped that into one bucket. A lot of comments about Durham's growing very quickly. We want to make sure that our infrastructure can handle everybody moving in, you know, that kind of stuff. And then number two, which kind of goes hand in hand with it, was affordable housing. So rents are going up, prices are going up. We're doing a lot of building in Durham, but we're in a really great region. We're in the research triangle. So we've also got Raleigh, nearby Chapel Hill, Cary, some other great counties. We've got the Research Triangle Park. So it's getting more expensive to live here. So folks are concerned about that. So those are the two things that rose to the top. We had the other stuff we expected, like, you know, public schools, libraries, a lot of stuff that cities do, like people talking about sidewalks and parks and some things like that that we don't directly do, but it's important for us to know about and that basically that just helped us figure out where we had Gaps in the plan. So maybe if there was something we didn't hear from the departments, but we heard from the community, we wanted to make sure to include that, too. So we ended up including an objective around housing. And it's going to make us strategically think about how we're going to partner with folks outside of the county to accomplish some of that.

Yeah, it's interesting, right, because you want economic growth, but then you see the challenges that come in, providing services around that and, and the infrastructure as well. So. So did you mean you just touched on it a little bit, but it's like, did you tell all the, all of the agencies or departments, like, you have to have something around planning, development or affordable housing, or was it just like you got to consider these items, you know, in your plan?

Yeah. So we, in these, what we call business plan meetings, I guess you could also call them like strategic plan alignment meetings, we went through each of the seven focus areas with each department. So this is another big thing is we don't want a culture where departments feel siloed and they're just in one focus area and that's all they touch. We want to give folks the opportunity to look outside their own focus area and see where else they can contribute and collaborate. So in going through each of those seven focus areas and the initiatives, we would ask, let us know what you would want to take the lead on. Let us know what you would maybe want to be a backup on. Like, you're not the one coming to the table and giving the update, but you're providing some of the data or collaborating with that department. So when we got to those things like housing or development, anything like that, we, you know, sometimes it's a given a particular department is going to maybe be taking the lead or working on it. But we wanted to hear from them and we wanted to know what they thought. So if they thought they could contribute to that initiative, we let them kind of flag that. And we're going to take all of that and synthesize it and figure it out for this particular objective or initiative, maybe. We heard from three departments that want to work on it. We want to make sure they're in a room talking to each other, not duplicating efforts, that kind of stuff.

So a lot of organizations are worried about change that takes place. And even for, for us, like a lot of our, our clients, we're like, we're holding off on something new until this election cycle goes through or, you know, prospects were saying, oh, yeah, I really want to do strategic Planning. But I want to weight. Well, you all had both some, some change in your leadership of appointed or hired people as well as elected people. So. And that happened kind of right after you implemented your strategic plan. So how does that like, tell me about the, the effects of that and, and how damaging or exciting kind of was it?

Yeah, I think the. So we, yeah, we've had a couple of leadership changes at the county, both elected and appointed. And, and yeah, we had a new county manager and some new board members and that all happened after the plan got adopted back in July. I think it's just important to stay flexible. So it's. When we developed the plan, we didn't ever say that anything's going to be set in stone. So we, I think we had a two year refresh planned eventually. So that's something that's going to come. But we've told everybody it's a living document. So we want to make sure that if any changes are to come, we can be adaptable, we can make that happen. But we've had a lot of support for management luckily over the development of the plan and even with this new plan. And I think it's important for us to just keep communicating with each other and we can also speak to all that engagement we did with the plan. And I think that's why that was important, so we can come and show these are the voices that went into this plan. It was the community, it was the employees, all these other folks. So even as leadership changes or people come and go, you've got something that has a pretty good foundation and we can point to that and we can show the data of where we heard some of this stuff from and where the ideas came from. And that's been really helpful. Helps us, I think in this time of change, it helps the plan be somewhat resilient. But again, we've got the flexibility built in, so we're not too worried about that.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of great takeaways. I'll point to two in particular in what y' all did is, is, is one, getting all of the community engagement certainly makes your plan quite defensible, you know, so I mean always elections bring change and new leadership brings change. But if you could say we're not going down this path illogically, like we've talked to all of our constituents and you, you kind of bring the receipts of that through all of that community engagement. And then I love the idea of, of saying in our five year plan we have a clear check in point you know, yours is at the two year mark. So it's like we're not, you know, putting this in stone. And I, I mentioned to you last week when we touched base was like when I worked with Drs. Norton and Kaplan, they always said the worst thing I wanted to see was a laminated strategy or a laminated strategy map because that meant someone thought that it was done, like it was finished enough to laminate. It's like no, we want something that's a living, breathing document and you have kind of the proof of this is what we heard from our residents, our community and you have. We're going to really look at changing it. It's not at five years we go relook at it, we're going to relook, you know, with a, with a tangible point at two years. So before we run out of time, I know we're really close. Any advice for someone just getting started with strategic planning?

Yeah, I think the biggest one as far as developing the plan, talk to folks again, just make sure you're getting out there with employees, keeping management up to date, two way communication, communication there, talking to the community as much as you can. I think if, if you're asking in relation to clearpoint, I think lean on clearpoint. So when that was my follow up.

Yeah, yeah.

We'Ve had some really great support. I want to shout out Heaven in particular, she's been awesome. But something I wanted to point out earlier was we had like over 100 scorecards and we were like, hey, is this a best practice? And she said no, not really. So, so we've had a lot of help with better organizing what we've got in there. So if you're new to strategic planning, like you have some good support with how to set it up and make it useful for people. If you've done it before, it's good to go in and do a refresh and we've been able to archive old stuff, start moving stuff over to and not really so. So we've had a lot of help with better organizing what we've got in there. So if you're new to strategic planning, like you have some good support with how to set it up and make it useful for people. If you've done it before, it's good to go in and do a refresh and, and we've been able to archive old stuff, start moving stuff over to a new system. So yeah, lean on clearpoint for support with the technical stuff. But I think big picture, make sure you're talking to people, keeping Folks updated, communicate with them along the way. And I want to shout out our analysts, too. So once our strategic plan was done, CG and Adriana did an amazing job throwing this big event where we actually lined it up with Employee Appreciation Week. So we hosted it here in our innovation lab. Invited employees came out, gave out swag, copies of the plan, that kind of stuff. So anybody who wasn't really engaged along the way had the opportunity to learn more about it. So it's a constant effort to educate as well and make sure people know where they sit in the plan. And that's really important, too. So, yeah, don't just collect the information, but once you've got the plan, make sure you go out and keep people up to date about it as well.

Now that's great. You took something that might normally be seen as a burden and turned it into, like, a celebration, a way to engage. We had another client one time make a strategy planned cake. So they made a graphic with their strategic plan and they put it on a cake, and it was the same way, same kind of party, when they just celebrated, you know, hey, this is what we did. And if you want to learn more about it, you know, drive through it. Well, Pat, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing all these great insights. We look forward to hearing more from Durham county in the future.

Yeah, thanks for having me. If anybody ever wants to brainstorm, shoot me an email. Always happy to talk.

Okay, thanks again.