Baldrige Excellence in Action: Strategic vs. Operational Planning with Fort Collins

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our customer interview webinar. Today we are welcoming Lawrence Pollack, Budget Director for the City of Fort Collins, who will explore the differences between strategic and operational planning and share his insights into achieving organization alignment. Interviewing Lawrence will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint Strategy's 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. Go ahead and take it away, Ted.

Thanks, Jenna. And thank you, Lawrence, for joining us. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your role in the city of Fort Collins?

Well, so I'm Lawrence Pollack. I've been in the budget office. Well, with the city of Fort Collins coming up on 19 years now and the last since 2011, being within the budget office itself, so serving a really great organization. We serve our community of about 175,000 people in Fort Collins. People may know us for being a very bicycle friendly community. We're also, if you go and Google it, we're one of two craft beer capitals in the United States. So there's a lot going on here. We're tucked up against the foothills of Colorado, so easy access to the mountains. And then our city organization, we have about 2,500 people, including hourly and seasonal, and an annual net budget of about $700 million.

And you're better at snow removal than.

You're much better at Snow removal than D.C. and other places out east. That's true.

So let's talk about strategy and operations. Can you tell me a little bit about how y' all manage strategy?

Yeah. So we implemented our first citywide strategic planning process in 2014, so a decade ago. And our intent in that was that we wanted every employee to be able to look at the strategic planning plan, to be able to see themselves, their work team, their work, what they're doing as part of the city's strategy. So we were effective in that we connected measures to that. And in 2023, at a Clearpoint community meeting, it was pointed out to me that our strategic plan was actually very heavily included a lot of operational aspects. So it really wasn't strategic in nature. We took that to and did some soul searching, evaluated what was in our plan, and ultimately Our most recent 2024 strategic plan is much more focused just on strategy, where we went down from 56 strategic objectives or goals to 20 in this most recent plan, which is a lot more manageable. And the metrics that we associate with that are more palatable to to evaluate and understand.

So. So 20 objectives. It sounds like a pretty simple strategy. Must be pretty easy to. To handle.

Well with 20. There's definitely. We try to have three to four metrics per strategic objective, again that being a goal and the idea being that those metrics are directionally insightful in our ability to achieve each of those objectives. We also link various programs and services in our budget process to that. And it might be helpful if I could share some screens in clearpoint and show how we connect all of that together.

Yeah, that would be great.

All right, let me go ahead and share. Give that a moment to pop up.

I can see it now.

Excellent. So this is. I've navigated in clearpoint to what we refer to as our citywide scorecard. We have lots of different scorecards for each department that's within the city. But the citywide scorecard is structured so that we see strategic objectives, measures or metrics and initiatives. And these have all been linked behind the scenes. So our objective, we're going to dive into this NLSH, which I'll refer to as NILSH 1.2. And it is connected to these three metrics and these six initiatives on the far right side. If I click into that, then it will show the specific structure and there's not a lot of data here because this is, we're just getting started for January 2025. But this will in clearpoint then show the specific metrics that we have linked to this. So those three metrics here we see a graphical visualization of the data and then those initiatives down here. So if I go back to this full grid, so hopefully you can see where we're back to strategic objectives, measures and initiatives. I'm going to change our date so that we can actually see some of the data from our last report, which was in November of 2024. I'll give this a moment to open up. And now we're going to see that same structure, but now there's color codes for the status of each of those items. The way that these work is that the, the red, yellow, green performance of any metric, we average those, we give them a point value and the average of those determines the red, yellow, green of the objective itself. We also have a status indicator on our initiatives here, and those are manually chosen by the owner of that program or service. So I'm going to go ahead and dive into one of these metrics. So this nilsh84 and notice that it's very easy to navigate back and forth with tabs that open up so you can see where you have been. One of the things that I like about this metric is that there's two different charts that are associated with it and both of those charts are coming from the same data grid that's at the bottom of this website or of this page. The other thing that I would point out here is that in this outcomes you can see this nilsh 1.2 that being that strategic objective. And so this is where we're creating that connectivity back to this strategic objective. So within those specific metrics you've got that data. If I take a look at one of the initiatives there's less information that we put in there. But what you'll see is that has standard information who the owner is percent complete and they're putting a status of this program or service. This one specifically is the homeless initiative. Homelessness initiatives and program ongoing city support. So it's got a status of green, it's got a. And then the text here, if this was red or yellow, then it would require an action plan of what does the data telling you and what do you need to do, if anything to get back on track. And again here is that linkage to Nilsh 1.2 and that way we are able to dynamically connect both metrics and initiatives to every one of the adopted strategic objectives or goals in our strategic plan. So it's pretty robust. Let me just show you quickly what that looks like from a report. So this is a report that comes right from clearpoint called a briefing book. And you can see now here's that neighborhood NLSH 1.2 with that yellow indicator. We had those three metrics that were red or yellow or sorry, green, red and green. We scroll down now, we can visualize those on this report and then here are those six initiatives that have also been linked to that strategic objective. And so very. It's very convenient that all of the data that we're seeing right here in clearpoint can be very easily through just a handful of clicks. Create a report that includes all of it that goes out on a quarterly basis to our executives and department heads. You might say well how do you. There's a lot of information there. How do you keep people on track? And there's a clearpoint has a best practice recommendation of helping your staff through that. And so we've adopted that. So we have here a calendar for three different reporting processes that we have. We have our OMAPs that help us report on strategy. OMAPs are organizational measures, analysis and performance, our council priorities. And then our Community Dashboard, which we might be able to show later. And just quickly as you scroll down in the month of February, all three of those will be due based on color coding. You can see the time during the month when those different activities are required. One thing I'll point out is you might see that there's work on two Saturdays here. Generally we don't prefer to work on Saturdays if we can avoid it. But through clearpoint and hopefully you can go. I'm showing the clearpoint screen again. If you click on this little hurricane symbol for automation, what we're using is just clearpoint functionality of reminders. And so for our council priority updates on Saturdays because we told the council that will or the staff will be doing those notifications on the 1st and 15th of the month. So we can then go ahead and we can automate who that's going to go to. So the specific element owners. And so that is all automated for us so that we don't have to come in on a Saturday. But that calendar really helps us understand when things are due for those three different reporting requests. And I'll stop sharing there.

No, that's. That's awesome. I was gonna. You kind of answered a few of the questions I was going to ask is like. So it looks like you're doing this on a quarterly basis. It looks like some of the measures might be annual and others are quarterly or monthly. Do you just go in each quarter and either do qualitative results on the annual or fill in the months if you wanted multiple months on the quarterly. I'm just.

Typically we strive to have measures with more frequent reporting periods. So quarterly kind of being a sweet spot for a lot of measures. There are many that the data is only available annually. For instance, our community survey data. And so one of the opportunities that we have is even though the, the metric itself doesn't change, we can speak in the analysis or the actions. What are the things that we're doing as a city to help improve those results?

Right. Yeah. And it's really nice to see the, the, all the initiatives kind of right in there is like what are we doing to, to, to, to drive some of those, those results also. Okay, so that's, that's really cool. On the strategy side. I'll review it quarterly. You produce that briefing book. Are you then meeting with the, the city manager and, and the directors or what is that? What does that look like?

Those are OMAP meetings. Those organizational measures, analysis and performance. Those are meetings with all department heads and the entire executive team. So they're pretty expensive meetings. There's a lot of data that is there. So we don't go through just the report, it's about 150 pages. But we do focus on specific aspects to have more value added conversations about the performance in either areas that are doing well, that we want to celebrate or areas where we need people's attention and help to improve results.

Awesome. So we've ripped all the operational stuff out of that strategy report. Where did the operations work go? I saw you had a, a lot of scorecards when you were showing clearpoint. Is it hiding in there?

Yes. So we have a lot more. So we're very formal and systematic on the strategic aspect with those OMAP meetings. The reports, we've defined the metrics, they need to be updated on a quarterly basis for our operational. We have a lot more autonomy within the departments to use the data for them to tell their story. Their metrics are not defined by the budget office or city hall. They need to be based on data that's accessible and valuable to that department. And those departments will ask, well, what do you mean by valuable? And when I say that, I mean that you're going to do something with the data. If you see that you're trending in the wrong direction or you're not able to hit your targets on a consistent basis, that is really an opportunity to dive in and see how you can improve your performance. So we have what are called quarterly service area reviews. A service area is just a group of related departments. And so in those quarterly meetings, that's where the operational metrics are discussed. Again, there's autonomy in those departments to focus on the data, the stories that they want to with a subset of the executive team, including the city manager, our deputy city manager. And in that as well. We don't have all operational data in clearpoint. We also have data in our financial system that we use J.D. edwards. And so we don't duplicate that in Clearpoint. But in those quarterly service area reviews is where those, the operational metrics are reviewed as well as the financials, which are another type of metric, of course.

Gotcha. So you just kind of bring those together, still have the appropriate people in the room, make sure the operations are on track. It's not like you just threw them out when you, when you narrowed down to the. The strategy reviews.

Correct. And if I could just show you something really quickly here. It's a different way that we're using clearpoint for operational. You know, you think operational metrics, you know, they'll look have the same look and feel as a strategic metric. And hopefully you can see the clearpoint screen where the it says initiatives owner and collaborators. So this is an example of our Council Priorities dashboard. And so these are the priorities that were adopted by our council. We show our owners and collaborators. Again, this is information of the email reminders that are going to go out on a Saturday to these people to update these. And our council decided they didn't want to have status indicators or metrics on a, on a quarterly basis with this. They just wanted the updates of. Oh, they just wanted the updates for what's the activity that is happening in the organization to help support each one of those objectives. Sorry, I had to log in there again. So here again is that our council priorities list. And when we click on that initiative, you'll see the owner there, the collaborators and then in the status information should be populating.

Oh yeah, I think you, you prepped too much for this. So you, you were logged in too long, so it logged you out. So now you're back.

In November I went back to. So when I logged back in, it took me to our current month of January. So going back to the last one of these reports, it's just a, an information update, but I think how easy this is. Staff gets an email reminder, oh, I need to go into clearpoint and do these updates. That needs to be done within a two week period. And then through a handful of clicks we push a button and then that report can be sent off to our elected officials. So very little touch time is necessary to update them on a real time basis.

That's really awesome. So you know, you were telling us a little bit about the, you know, some of your budget data lives over in JD Edwards, but do the service areas or the departments within the service areas, how do they manage their, their budget request and how do you provide transparency to your residents or even the rest of the city employees about what's happening around the budget?

So with our budget requests we require that they connect to both strategy and to metrics. And so from our budget page, which is fcgov.com and you can, there's a lot of information here, but we have PDF reports that show all of the budget requests that have been submitted. So we've got these PDF reports. So any, anybody who's interested, this is our externally facing website, can click on that and they can see all the budget requests. There's 269 pages in this PDF and this first one is, it has an offer number of 7.1. It's for community renewable purchase power. Standard information like what are the costs per year? We do a biennial budget. Are there FTE associated with this? But in there they're required to do two specific things. One is this link to strategic objectives. So they have to say how does or which strategic objective in the adopted strategic plan if funding this budget request will help achieve that objective. And so in this case, they've selected this one called E&V1. But more importantly, they have to say how funding this budget request would support that objective. What they're doing when they're building this budget request and selecting these objectives, they're already planning that if this gets funded, they know they're going to have to report on it on a quarterly basis in those OMAP meetings. Similarly, we have a required section for performance metrics. One of the things we really like about this is that. So this is our public website, but you can see this link to a metric called ENB 25 Total New Installed Solar capacity. And when we click on that, it'll take us to the data coming right from clearpoint. So people aren't actually getting into clearpoint to see this data. We've taken it from clearpoint, published it to a unique website, and then we can connect that website to our own PDFs. And so that's been really helpful in allowing us to be transparent with the data aspect of these various budget requests. So it doesn't just sound like whining for dollars. You can use real data to talk about your performance or what you're trying to achieve with any given budget request.

Has that helped people think more carefully about what they request money for? Or is it the people complain about it? Or are they excited about being able to say, hey, look, now I can demonstrate the value that of the things that I'm working on. Or is it a mixture?

It's a spectrum. The large group of people, we probably have 200 people that write budget requests across the city are involved in some way. But you can see the people who really embrace the importance of data and helping tell your story do love the ability to be able to graphically show data into what could be just mundane reading of various budget requests.

Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a really nice way to be able to, to see that. And I think pushes for accountability too. When you're doing, you know, budgets in a public manner, it's kind of harder to, to hide that way.

Accountability. I think that public transparency is really important in that regard, especially for governments in a trust in government has been declining for a significant period of time. And so in addition to us having in clearpoint, all staff can get a free browser license to go and look at any data that's there. There's nothing that's hidden or sensitive. So we're transparent in that regard to our staff of 2,500 people externally to the community, we're public or we're transparent through the those budget requests and being able to show the data and support. And then we also have some community facing dashboards which are also, they have different purposes. The one that hopefully you're seeing here is what we refer to as our community dashboard. And we've had this up being supported through clearpoint for the last decade. So this data again all coming directly through clearpoint, very easy to update on a quarterly basis to refresh the website. And this website has three different kind of levels if you will. So we have these outcomes, think of them as focus areas, focal groups, and then here is the performance of each of those. Refer to this as like level one. You can click on any one of these and what that will do is then take you to show you the specific metrics that have been associated with this outcome and then on you can see the performance and its red, yellow, green result. And then on any one of those we can go ahead and click on to see the actual data associated with it and associated analysis of performance. So the purpose of this dashboard is really to allow anybody, residents, community members, business to put their finger on the pulse of the city of Fort Collins. We have a different website that is specific to a program where we're talking about our climate future, the climate action plan goals that we have. This website, different purpose, has a very different look and feel, similar graph at the top with information. Again, all of this coming directly from clearpoint. But as you scroll down then you can find different areas that you want to learn more about, maybe ground travel for instance. And if you click on learn more there, then it will take you to a deeper level of data and various associated metrics. So both of those dashboards, again, different purposes, but trying to be transparent with data for our community. And it has been so easy for us in using clearpoint because we can get those updated after we have our data updated in clearpoint in a very efficient manner.

No, it's great. We've seen a lot of organizations over the years say I want something that looks like the Fort Collins, you know, performance dashboard or like the climate Action Plan. And I think you all were ahead of your time on Climate action plans because I think that dashboard's been up for five, five years or so and we've just seen a few others, you know, coming in in different ways. So we got a few, a few questions have come in now. One's about, well, let's just jump into them around the budget request process, including, you know, kind of all the associated parts like does it take place inside of your financial software, inside of Clearpoint, or both. Just kind of just clarifying how that that budget request process works. And I got about three more, so only got five.

Really quickly we have an in house built software program because our financial software is pretty arcane. We've had it for 25 years. Now we're looking at going to a new financial ERP system and the intent is that that system is where we will do that budgeting request. But keeping those linkages to clear point, as I had showed you for online transparency.

Yeah, and how do you link. Oh, they're flowing in now, so this is going to be a speed round. I should have put in the request earlier. How do you link operations to the strategy, let's say within clearpoint? So I know you have a bunch of different things, but are there ever any kind of clear linkages or do you keep them separate?

Well, actually that's a good point. I neglected to say earlier when I was showing how each budget request had to link to some aspect of strategy because we drastically reduced the number of strategic objectives that we had in our plan. We have another kind of goal or objective, which is an operational objective, about 24, 7, 365 operational excellence for our community. And so when they're submitting those budget requests, they can differentiate. Is it more of an operational budget request or is it more strategic and aligning with our adopted strategic plan?

Gotcha. How did you win the baldrige?

We started that journey in 2009, learning from a local hospital who had recently received that designation. It was through a lot of work, a lot of feedback from going through state, regional and then the national process with opportunities for improvement. And frankly, this is the world according to Lawrence. But I believe that the framework that we were able to build with strategy and performance metrics and using clearpoint to visualize that data was a feather in our cap in being able to achieve that designation.

How many of your employees have access to ClearPoint to make editing capabilities of the 2500?

Of the 2500, we have about 80 different types of user licenses that give different types of access.

I was going to say something similar. Let me see now we only have a minute left. Can you talk about the transition from the old way of managing strategy and into clearpoint or did clearpoint kind of come when you all released your first strategic plan?

They were really about the same time. It was just fortuitous the way that worked. We had started working with clearpoint around that time. Our initial purpose was that community dashboard I showed you. But one of the things that I really like about clearpoint is that you don't pay for individual modules. You're paying for the functionality. And so you can, as an organization, can prioritize where do you want to start and then build from there. And that's one of the things that I wish if there was a vision that we had of what we have now, it would have been great if we knew that 10 years ago where we wanted to go. But we didn't. And so I think you just get started knowing it's not going to be perfect. You got to be in an organization that embraces feedback. Take that gift of learning and help your whatever you're using, whether that strategy, performance metrics, use that feedback to evolve and improve yourself.

Awesome. You, you, you wrapped us up nicely. We are out of time. I have about four more questions for those of you that submitted questions that we didn't get to. What we'll do is I'll capture them, get them over to Lawrence for an answer, and when we release the recording, we will also make sure that all these questions have answers in the text.

You can also reach out to me directly@lpolockcgov.com Happy to answer questions that weren't able to be answered here.

Awesome, Lawrence, thank you very much. This was awesome.

Thank you, Ted. It's been great.