ClearPoint 11.5 (Webinar 35)

Hello everyone and welcome to the I Didn't Know clearpoint Could do that webinar series. My name is Kathryn and I'll be your host for today's webinar. And today is a moment you've all been waiting for. It's here. It's clearpoint 11.5. Now, you might be apprehensive about new changes to adjust to, but don't worry if you're feeling like this. We can assure you that the awesome new features in Clearpoint 11.5 will soon have you feeling more like this. And before we dive into everything, a few housekeeping announcements. We will be recording this session and we'll make it available within a week. The webinar will last about 25 minutes with time for questions, so you can submit your questions to supportlearpointstrategy.com any that we don't get to at the end we'll follow up with via email. Now at our last installment, we did a deep dive into some of clearpoint's chart customization and I highly recommend checking out that recording on our blog, Vimeo channel or support center. Just search Webinar so as all of you know, today we are introducing the latest and greatest clearpoint features to be gracing a computer screen near you in just a few weeks. So we'll show you a new addition to the Measure Library. We'll point out some changes to the admin options screen, we'll show you how to recalculate parts of clearpoint, we'll introduce some new advanced integration and security features, and we'll walk you through new features that will make it easier than ever to standardize your measures and evaluate your initiatives and milestones. So I know there's a lot of anticipation today and let's get right to it. We are strolling the friendly streets of Metropolis and first things first, we are actually going to go beyond the Metropolis city limits to the wide world of the ClearPoint measure library. So the Measure Library was introduced so that organizations would have a way to share measures and benchmark against one another. We have over 300 measures in this library, including a set put together by icma. So say you're looking for an example of how another organization tracks emergency response time, for example. Or you're interested in see which measures cities are using to ensure the safety of their community. I know I've gotten questions like this before from municipalities using clearpoint, and now there's an easy way to pose that question to a whole group of awesome performance driven professionals who are participating in the measure library already. So let's use this toggle to click on the discussion icon and we can see that here we have a general discussion where users can pose questions about the measure library, and users can also start focused conversations around benchmarking in these different program areas. So, going off the example I just stated, let's click over to Public Safety. I can just click to add a comment here to say hello everyone, what metrics do you use to track emergency response time? You used a percentage for seven minutes or an average time. How do you segment various emergency situations? All right, so now I'm going to put my question out there as clearpoint Support or whichever username you're logged in as, and this will be timestamped here as well. Then if another organization were to come across my question through this message, then they could respond and even use the measure library to share their measure with the organization in need. And in case you're thinking, who wants to come and check this discussion thread every day to see if you've gotten an answer? Well, we don't want you to do that either, unless you're really determined, in which case more power to you. It'll probably save you some time in any case though, to just subscribe to this thread, and that way you can receive a daily digest email when any new comments are made. So we're really excited about this discussion board. It's going to be a great way for our users to make connections, exchange ideas, and learn best practices from other organizations. Now we do want to point out some changes that you can anticipate to the look and feel of your account as well, specifically in Admin options. So let's click over to System Settings Admin Options and take a look. Now, we've still got all of our fan favorite features for administrators here, but some of them have been spread out a bit. For example, you can now find report options in its own designated area rather than tucked away into Organization and Security. And same with Default fields versus Custom fields. These used to be in the same window, but now under default fields we've got the fields that clearpoint associates with each element type by default. And under Custom fields are the fields that your organization has added to your account based on your reporting needs. And of course we've also got some new additions to the admin options Mix. So first up in the top right here is Recalculate. Now, if you've got several layers of calculations rolling up into a measure series, recalculating gives clearpoint a little boost to make sure all that data is fully refreshed, and this can also come in handy when you're working with the master measures and project evaluations that we'll talk about in a little bit. So to refresh the elements in one or more scorecards, all I need to do is click on Recalculate, select a scorecard, and then click Recalculate to generate the freshest of data. Moving on down in the bottom left we've got API keys which are going to allow you more flexibility and security when working with the ClearPoint API. So what is an API? API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it is a solution that allows two separate applications to communicate information to one another, similar to a waiter acting as a go between for people dining in a restaurant and the chefs in the kitchen. Now, don't worry if you personally are not familiar with the ins and outs of how APIs work, but if any members of your team are working to integrate ClearPoint with other solutions like Power BI, for example, these API keys are going to make things easier and more secure. So these keys allow you to work on direct connections where authentications are provided for each data call, whereas previously, any connections or scripts utilizing the API would have had to supply a username and password to an authentication endpoint in order to start an authorized session. So as long as any client making an API call provides valid API keys, this removes that need for any extraneous API calls in order to authenticate. Now, in addition to not requiring a username and password as credentials, any connections to the API via these keys can be expired, revoked, or switched amongst users in clearpoint whenever needed, without impact to other users of quickpoint. So, moving on down to the bottom right corner, you can see we have another new addition, which is IP restrictions. If your team is concerned with keeping close tabs on security, this new addition will come in handy. And you can go about this in two ways. So entering an IP address or a range of IPs into the whitelist box ensures that only the whitelisted IP addresses that fall within that list will be able to access your clearpoint account. Then, from the flip side, if you choose to blacklist IP addresses or ranges, any addresses except for those in your blacklist will be able to access your clearpoint account. All right, now it's time to introduce an awesome new feature that you might not have even known you needed, and that is Master measures. So see if this situation sounds familiar. Your city has set up a budget measure complete with calculated series, a cool forecast chart, and a custom layout and after getting it approved, you've duplicated that measure into every department scorecard in your account. But come time for your next performance review, the city manager takes another look and decides it would be really beneficial to see its second chart on each budget measure that shows the year to date spend versus the budget for the year overall. And in the past, this would have meant adding that new chart to every budget measure that you've already set up individually. But now with Master Measures, you can link measures to a central setup so that any changes to charts or series only have to be made once. So let's take a look at how that works. First, I'm going to go into our Transportation Department to show you the budget measure that I want to use as a basis for my template. So this is a measure where I know I want to have it standardized in several scorecards. I want to make sure they all stay the same. I've got a chart showing our projected end of year variance and several raw and calculated series that I want to make sure each department has available to enter data. So in order to use this setup as a basis for other budget measures, I'm going to head back over to Admin Options and click on Master Measures. I will use the plus icon to add my Master measure. And we'll see here that I'm selecting a scorecard and particular measure to use as a template. So I want to use that budget measure here. When I've got it selected, I'll click Save. And now, since this is going to be a central template, let's go ahead and edit it to get rid of that Transportation Department specific verbiage here in the title. So let's just call this department budget measure so we can edit our Master Measure series and charts from this window. And same thing on our Charts tab. I'm just going to want to go in and adjust the name of the chart to say Department Budget rather than mentioning Transportation. So I'll click Save. Click Save again. And now the magic happens. So let's close out of this window and we'll go over to a different department, our Parks and Rec department, and we'll click into the budget measure that we've started setting up there. And as you can see, we don't really have it completely set up yet. All we've got is two series here. We don't have a chart. So what we can do, rather than recreate the whole format of that Transportation Department budget measure, is to simply link the budget in Parks and Rec to our Master Measure template. So I'M going to click the Edit icon, head over to the Edit Measure tab, and we'll see a new option here to link a master measure. And this is where we're going to choose the template that we've created. Now let's click Save and see what happens. All right, so look at this. All of those calculated and raw series have appeared and if we enter some data, click Save, we're going to see our calculation start to populate. So all of those series and all of their calculation settings have been transferred from that Master Measure template into this linked budget measure. And if we go into Edit the layout, we can also bring out the department budget master measure chart, which has the same visual and series settings that it has in our MasterMeasure template. So this is a huge time saver so far. And what about our scenario we mentioned before, where we need to add a new chart to all of these budget measures that are supposed to be formatted the same way? Well, all we need to do now that this measure is linked is go to admin options into our Master Measure, back over to our chart tab and we can click to add a master chart here. So we'll call this year to date spend budgets, save to continue. And then on that chart series tab, I'm going to just go ahead and make sure that the right series that I want to see so year to date and the annual budget are selected and we're closing out here. So now when we go back to our Parks and Recreation budget measure, we can edit the layout and we'll see our new chart is available here and it's going to pull in the data that we specified right away. So Master Measures are a great way to standardize and update your measures and it allows you to use the same series calculations and charts without having to duplicate measures or rebuild from scratch. So this is going to be especially useful for any type of measure that you tend to reuse. So another example might be if your organization's HR department sends out an internal survey with a standard set of multiple choice options for every question, you could set up a measure for every question based on a master measure with the series and charts that you'd want to show. And then any updates you make to that format can be incorporated across all of your survey question measures at once. Now, Master measures aren't the only way that Clearpoint 11.5 makes it easier to reference the information you need. We've got a new type of calculation, also called a reference series. So say for example, that here in our budget Measure. We also want to show some information about how much we've budgeted for a particular price project in our scorecard. Maybe we're working towards comparing the budget across a few of our biggest departmental projects this year. So if I click on our initiative dropdown, I can see that installing a network of rental bikes and redesigning one of the city's central playgrounds are our two biggest projects. Now, before, if we wanted this budget information from our initiatives to show in our Measured Detail page, we would have had to go and look at the initiative budget and then copy it into every period in a new series in our data table. And then, heaven forbid, there were any changes on the initiative page that we didn't take into account. But reference series are going to allow us to pull this information in automatically. Yep, that's right. You heard me correctly. We're referencing initiative information in our measure data table automatically. So let's scroll down, double click into our data table, and we'll add a series here. And I'm going to call this Playground Redesign Budget. But since we're adding a calculation, I'm going to head over to the Calculation tab, and when I click into my series calculation type, we'll see there's a newcomer here. Here at the bottom we have Reference series. And once we click on reference series, we'll see some new options here. So what this allows you to do is to take a particular type of element, which really can be any element type, but we're going to use Initiative from a particular scorecard, choose an element whose information you want to show, and then we'll pick one of the initiative reference fields to showcase that information in the measure data table. So this list of fields is going to contain any field that has a quantitative data type. So currency, percentage, or numeric custom fields are going to work great. And we've also got some default fields that clearpoint set up, like total days for your initiative. So we're going to choose Budget, and when we click Save, we're going to see our project budget being pulled in right here on the screen. So now that we have that information in our data table, we can chart it, we can do calculations. The possibilities are really endless. So reference areas are really useful on their own, but there's one specific area that they were really created for, and that is Project evaluation. Now, just as a note here, when we say projects, we're referring to all the elements in clearpoint with start and end dates. So your milestones, action, items, initiatives, Project evaluations can be used for any of These elements. And now that you see how reference series allow you to pull information from these project elements into your measures, it's not a far jump to see how tracking this quantitative information is going to be the key that allows you to evaluate those projects automatically. So reference series can display so many different fields that it really makes evaluating your projects a choose your own adventure, be it budget, percent complete, or a custom field, these can all become the basis for your organization's project evaluation. And we're actually going to leverage both Master measures and reference series together. And in order to set up that evaluation. So say in Metropolis world of project management, we like to base our initiative status on our percent complete. We're really looking to see whether we're achieving the same percent complete as we would have anticipated based on the progress of our project timeline. So I've actually got a measure set up here already called Initiative Evaluation Template, where I've started to set up a comparison for percent complete. So this is a really basic measure. It's just got two percentage series here, one for the percent complete and one for the target that we would expect to see. And in order to set up an evaluation for our project, we're going to go create this measure as a new master measure. So I'm heading back over to admin options, clicking on Master Measures again plus icon to add. And this time I'm going to select Initiative Evaluation Template. Now let's click to edit these. And here is where our reference series is going to come in handy. So I've got a percent complete series here that I'm going to edit, go to the Calculation tab, and I'm going to set up percent complete as a reference. So now, since we're editing from our MasterMeasure template, we're no longer selecting a particular initiative in ClearPoint. This is just for initiatives overall. And this also means that since we're using an Initiative field, this template is going to be for initiative evaluations, whereas we'd have to use Milestone field to evaluate milestones. So now that we've chosen an initiative, I can just go ahead and choose percent complete as my reference field. And this is going to pull the percent complete for any initiative that we are using this MasterMeasure for into the data table. And now the step you've all been waiting for, the automatic evaluation. And these particular steps are actually not that exciting since setting up this evaluation is the same format as what you've always done to automatically evaluate your measures in clearpoint. So we're going to just restrict this to above or below target, use the no information status when there's no information. And I'm comparing my percent complete to my target. So whenever the percent complete is greater than what we would expect, it's going to be on target. Whenever it's less, that means we're lagging, we're below plan. So a quick save. And lastly, I'm going to want to use this percent complete evaluation for the measure overall. Now let's click Save and we've created a master measure. But how do we tie this master measure to our project? For that, we are going to close out and explore that one last piece here in admin Options Project Evaluation. And we'll see here that we've got options to apply a master measure to any of our project element types, and we can choose which of our master measures to make available for these elements. So as I mentioned earlier, the master measure we just set was for initiatives. But if you set up a different master measure, you could apply it to your milestones, your action items, etc. So we've checked the box next to Initiative Evaluation Template, and that's going to make our master measure available to evaluate our initiatives. So now let's go and see it in action with our Playground Redesign initiative, and nothing's happened yet. Let's go into our Edit window to our Edit Initiative tab and switch our evaluation master measure from not evaluated to our Initiative Evaluation template. So when we click Save, still nothing's happened. But I'm going to edit the layout and get ready for some new features so I can pull out a measured data table based on that qualitative information that's now linked to our initiative. Excuse me, Quantitative information that's now linked to our initiative. I have the chart here that I can pull out as well, and I can even show our series evaluation criteria. So let's click Save and we can see here that when we start entering data, our chart is ready to go. Now, there's a lot of periods in that data table. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to quarterly to make things a little more manageable. And since our project is spanning all of 2018, I can say each quarter we want to accomplish an additional 25% of our project. So we've got that data entered. We'll click Save. And now if I enter a percent complete for Q1, we can see that our initiative has automatically turned green. This is auto updating based on the percent complete evaluation that we've set up. We can see this in our data table. We can Also see it reflected in the Gantt chart. And this is going to make sure that our evaluation is standardized for any initiatives that we've linked that master measure to. Now, this isn't all you can do with project evaluations, of course. We'll go more into depth into some additional options, like evaluating an initiative on the average of your milestones per set complete and other options that you can take advantage of in a future webinar. This is just a preview of what's to come, and with that I want to make sure to leave time for some questions. I know this is a lot of new information, so here's your Master measure. What if you want to edit or get rid of that information just for that one measure? That is a good question. We know that maybe you wanted to backtrack on that linkage or keep the information but separate it from the changes in a master measure. You can actually do both of those options. If we go back over to admin options, there is a central place where you can see all the measures linked to your master measure. So I click into our template and over to the Measures tab, and here is where I could unlink a measure that I no longer want to update along with changes to our template. And we've got two options here. So Delete is going to remove any of those master series and charts, and Unlink is going to keep them in your measure but allow you to edit them independently. And so just as a little background as to what I'm referring to there, if we go back into our budget measure and we click into our edit window, you can see here that for this linked measure, all of these series and charts that are pulling in from the master Measure are not editable here. They have to be edited centrally. So this keeps everything standardized. But you do have the option to unlink a measure if you decide it no longer needs to have that format. So we've had another question come in about visibility in the measures library, and this is a good question. Is the measure library still only visible to people who are admins? No, the measure library is visible to both administrators and scorecard administrators. The administrators are the only ones who can add measures to the library. But I did want to point out that the discussion feature is available to members alike will be able to contribute to discussions.