ClearPoint Strategy Florida Municipal Webinar

Hello, everybody, and welcome to our webinar on managing performance and transparency in municipalities. Today we're going to be focused on Sarasota county and the city of Tamarack, and we have. Let me see if I can get us moving. We have several speakers today. Myself, I'm Ted Jackson. I'm managing partner here at clearpoint, and I also am lucky to have Tracy Miller, the manager of strategy development at Sarasota county, and Mike Cernich and Laura Karpoviciuti at the City of Tamarack. So the way we're going to do this is first, I'm going to talk for just another minute, and then I'm going to hand it over to Tracy. Then we're going to hand it over to Tamarack, and then we're going to take questions at the end. If you have any questions, you can submit them to supportlearpointstrategy.com so here at Clearpoint, the reason why we're hosting this webinar is we help municipalities improve their strategic performance. We do that in three separate ways with managing your strategic plan. You will hear a lot from Sarasota and Tamarac about that, as well as creating community dashboards for your citizens to see and in helping to helping municipalities network together with others and sharing best practices. I'll talk about that at the very end before questions. So with no further ado, I would like to introduce Tracy Miller or turn the mic over to Tracy from Sarasota County.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ted. As Ted mentioned, I'm Tracy Miller and I, I like to say I come to work every day and think about the future. I've been the strategic Planner here since May 2013, and previously I spent 20 years at the alliance for Innovation, or formerly known as the Innovation Groups. So our strategic planning team, made up of the county administrator, the deputy county administrator, the OFM director or financial management director, and myself, we saw performance management and strategy alignment as vitally important. Pretty much from the day one that I began here. We feel that strategic planning and performance done well really creates a roadmap for others to follow, regardless of who sits in the seat, which is particularly important right now as we are about to experience a county administrator change. Since 2009, there have been four county administrators, and as I mentioned, we're about to get another one. So paving the way for a new administrator is, you know, is in the near future. But change hasn't only been at the top, actually, for us. It's, you know, we've seen a lot of leadership turnover for an organization the size of 2300 or so, really since the recession, there's been a lot of leadership turnover in that time frame. The organization is working hard with. This is one of my favorite pictures, transition fatigue. And even now we are challenged with fiscal uncertainty, certainty, and certainly depleted reserves as well, which really challenges our ability to provide service delivery. To complicate matters, the strategic planning environment we stepped into more than four years ago was pretty complex and at times relatively punitive, sometimes in a public way. So it wasn't the best environment for folks. And we set out to simplify our efforts, make them actually a lot more meaningful for folks, and create methods for practical application. What has resulted is what you see here. This is our strategic planning model. It's an organic model that is constantly in play. We do not have a plan. We have a model that we live and breathe every day. We created the model in 2014 and are now making some subtle adjustments to reflect further alignment with our major initiatives and our board priority process. The model is based on our simple principles of being succinct, innovative, meaningful, practical, lasting, and certainly also always evolving. So it has that organic component to it. Our people represent all the staff who have a role in strategic planning, and the overall planning cycle is married to the budget cycle. Throughout the year, the model has allowed us to create a platform to align our mission, our vision and our goals throughout the organization. Which, you know, alignment is at the key, at the cornerstone of how you make all of this work in the long run. That alignment has caused us to create what we call here the strategic alignment framework that drives the enterprise pieces into the departments through our major initiatives and board priorities, our objectives and our measures. Overall, we have eight strategic goals and these are instrumental in our alignment framework. All of our objectives and measures throughout the organization are related to at least one or more of these goals. At a very practical level, we discuss our efforts in monthly leadership meetings, both at the enterprise level, and several of our departments have monthly or bimonthly meetings and this helps us to identify both trends and make critically important financial decisions as well. In the last four years we have built a data driven program and to visualize our measurement, we created a dashboard using clearpoint that has been extremely helpful in quantifying and displaying business cases for decisions that we make down the line. We also have strong internal budgeting tools and we practice strategic planning year round rather than just at specific times of the year. It has led to this notion of a culture shift where strategic planning is more of a positive thing than that punitive Thing I mentioned earlier, at the heart of what we are trying to do is really to stimulate the staff's ability to strategically resolve problems and make improvements that certainly affect efficiency and effectiveness. We feel like if we can connect people to those things that inspire their ideas, they will result in improvements throughout the organization. And one way we have been doing that is through our employee input group, which ultimately represents many of the future leaders of the organization. Regardless of their title, these individuals meet directly with the county leadership to address permafrost, as we call it, but get direct messaging and inevitably act as ambassadors of the overall messaging from leadership on down and up and down as well. So we also hear problems from deep within the organization from these folks as well. We are also aggressively pursuing process improvements by providing stretch assignments to those folks who are in the EIG group and other key individuals in the organization. This has really had a two fold effect where we grow the skills and capabilities of those people who are on a process improvement team. And we save a lot of money in the form of consultant dollars, which right now is around $500,000 just in consulting contracts that we've been able to do in house as opposed to hiring an outside consultant to do it. And I would contend that those products tend to be more well grounded in the things that we can actually do and implement internally because they are from an internal lens. We see our work in strategic planning and performance management as really the means to provide our focus on the future. It is part of all of our conversations as we look ahead. And performance monitoring and trends are becoming more and more prevalent as we really have to make these critical decisions that are financial in nature. And so with that, I see my 210 marker and I will gladly take any questions as they come and look forward to hearing from more of you. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much, Tracy. I'm going to hold questions to the end. I'm going to try to put us see if I can put us back into the PowerPoint. So let me unmute our friends in Tamarac. Give me one second. Laura and Mike, are you there?

I'm here, Ted.

Hi, Ted.

Oh, excellent. So now we have Mike Cernich and Laura Karpovicuti from the city of Tamarack to talk a little bit about their approach to performance management. And we will then take questions at the end.

Thanks, Ted. One of the things that is important in terms of performance management is first and foremost understanding your community, in our case, our city. And so just a little bit about tamarack. Tamarack is 55 years old. Which means we are a relatively young city. Tamarack is in southeast Florida. Our city limits butt up against the city of Fort Lauderdale. And then out west, we stretch all the way out to the Sawgrass Expressway, which is our border with the Florida Everglades. Tamarack is a mostly suburban city. We have just over 63,000 residents at this time. And we are home in our commerce parks and our plazas to just about 2,000 businesses. So in our 55 years of existence, our population has changed fairly dramatically. In the beginning, Tamarack was primarily a white retirement community. And we've transitioned now to a majority minority, multicultural community of all ages. And so with that brings a tremendous number of challenges in order to meet the needs and the expectations of all of those customers. And the performance management that we utilize is key in helping us to stay on track, to ensure that our high level and high quality of services to our residents continues to make us an attractive place to live and an attractive work environment for our employees. And so in order to do that, you know, we collect and analyze and use metrics to measure and achieve our progress towards the goals that our city commission sets for us and sets with us in our strategic planning process. And our strategic planning process is, I believe, is a fairly innovative process in so much as years ago, we asked the commission to set goals at a very high level and then allow us to kind of make the magic happen for them with business plans and work plans and through the budgeting process. And so we asked them to set five strategic goals. The first goal was to be an inclusive community. The second goal is to have a healthy financial environment. The third goal is to have a dynamic organizational culture. The fourth goal is clear communication. And the fifth goal is to have a vibrant community. And so the data that we collect is all focused on that, and it helps keep us on track as we're implementing our strategy. It also helps us to identify operational improvements and reallocate our resources as necessary to stay on track in terms of meeting those goals. So performance management in TAMARAC is integrated into all of our processes, procedures, and policies and goes through regular performance review, from monthly division and department meetings to the quarterly meetings that I hold with our executive team Every quarter, I review the citywide performance data with our executive team, and we have conversations about the scorecards that we use and how departments and divisions are doing. We talk about our customer satisfaction data and be sure that it's meeting our expectations. And we talk about our progress with strategic plan implementation, and we'll share some examples of that shortly. Our Performance management system also helps to promote transparency internally and externally. And Laura is going to share a little bit later about how we share our performance information with the community and with our customers. So as we go through our quarterly report performance reviews with our executive team, in one case, we noticed that our building department customer satisfaction was not meeting our target. This did not actually match the actual level of service provided by our building department. Our plan review times were great. Our permitting process was great. In fact, we have implemented an electronic plan review process to help us reduce plan review times, to better rely on technology and consistently meet the targets that we've set. And we know that our employees perform at a very high level and they place a great. They place great emphasis on providing great customer service. So we didn't understand where the disconnect was coming from between what the scorecard and the surveys reflected and what we were actually seeing. And so we realized that for a department that serves a large volume of customers, only a very small fraction of the customers that we were serving were leaving feedback. So our data collection was off. And the data that we were getting was skewed by 1, 2, 3 respondents that weren't satisfied with their experience, but who had a disproportionate impact on the overall scores that we were looking at. And so the root cause was that our data collection mechanism was actually inadequate at the counter. And so surveys were left out on the counter, but the staff wasn't mentioning them to the customer. The staff wasn't engaging the customer to fill out those surveys. And if they were, they weren't doing it at the appropriate time during the transaction. And so our data wasn't accurate in terms of what the service level really was. So to get a true representation of the customer satisfaction, we implemented a program where our permit staff was held accountable for encouraging their customers to fill out the survey. And if you look at the chart on the screen, you can see in the chart that once we began collecting 100 plus survey responses, the building department's scorecard changed dramatically. And it went from, in this case, blue and yellow to mostly green, which is where they needed to be. So this had the effect of us knowing that our data collection was right and that the data that we were getting was accurately depicting the customer's experience. But the other thing that it did was that it had a very positive impact on, on the morale of the people that work in that department and serve those customers. Building departments are traditionally a tough place to work, and ours in the past was like that. We've spent a Great deal of time and effort trying to improve the department, the processes, the procedures, first to serve the customer, but also to honor our commitment to our employees to be a great place to work. And so that worked out very well for us. Another example where we've used data collection and data management to really tie into our strategic plan was, as I mentioned, we talk regularly about the strategic plan and strategic plan implementation with my executive team. And so one of the things that we learned through our employee survey was that as great as we thought our technology was, they wanted better technology. And that for our employees, new technology, the latest technology, was a fairly significant priority. So our strategic plan provided for PC replacement project to help us achieve our strategic goal, number three, which is to have a dynamic organizational culture. So we did a couple of things to do this right. Number one, we recognized that our existing PC replacement plan was a five year plan, and we had a five year contract for PC replacement and we needed to change that. So we negotiated a three year equipment lease instead of the five year contract. And the three year equipment lease actually ended up to be more cost effective for us. And at the same time, it allowed our employees access to better technology on a more frequent basis, which certainly made them happy. Now, the challenge we had was we ran into an issue with the implementation. We were not able to do it as quickly as we planned. And knowing how important PC replacement and technology upgrades are to our workforce, we had to address this issue. That's where our executive team review meetings come in very handy. When I have all the department directors at one table, I can ask them all to help to identify solutions to these types of problems. And in this case, we were able to get to the root of the problem, which was actually limited staffing in our IT department department. And once we recognized that the staff in IT was limited and was actually working as fast as they possibly could, we were able to identify some other resources, reallocate those resources, and bring in temporary staff to get the project done on time and in fact, under budget. So that project is another example of a project that was successfully completed and our employees now enjoy better technology sooner. You know, as I mentioned, this effort is a citywide effort. And before I discuss performance with our executive team, measured data has already been analyzed on the departmental and division levels during the departmental and division level monthly reviews. And the departmental staff provides expectations, the explanations for performance, and they brainstorm potential solutions at the ground level and solve a lot of those problems for me down there. And with that, I'll ask Laura to.

Chime in as Mike mentioned, the departmental staff in the city of Tamarack own their measures. They collect the data, they enter the data, and they analyze it. And at this level, we're increasingly beginning, beginning to utilize technology to record this data analysis, which helps support transparency within our organization. So everybody in our organization, including managers and supervisors at any time can look at performance data and can look at those explanations of why we're not meeting the target. It also helps us keep a record for the future. So if we're comparing data for, let's say, this July compared to last July, we can see if there's a discrepancy, what caused it, what was the actual reason for maybe lower performance last year? And this is especially frequently utilized by our park department when they look at sports field usage. Next slide. Thank you. We also share strategy with the public and performance with the public. When it comes to sharing strategy with the public, we want to share what's relevant to our audience and keep things simple and not create a lot of work for us. So we do not put our entire performance management system out there. Instead, we try to identify what the public is interested in. So we share high level strategic plan actions, such as construction of fire stations or parks. We share high level metrics, for example, public safety data, customer service data, and other indicators that we think public will be interested in. And to help the public understand what they're looking at, we provide some background information. You know, what is it that we measure, why do we measure it, what's the impact, and what do we do to accomplish our goals to improve the metrics? We also share our operational performance with the public, and we've been doing it for a long time. Actually, I found some data in our budget for as far going as far back as 1995, and we also publish it to the website. It used to be two separate processes that we had where our staff would have to go to the scorecards, look up their data, enter that data into their budget sheets, which then got inserted into the budget, and separately go back and update the web pages, which sometimes resulted in inconsistencies and delays in website updates. To streamline this process, we actually built these performance pages in our performance management system, and we're now able to download the reports of those pages and insert them into our budget books. And we are able to publish this directly to the public to the website. So everything comes from one source. And we were able to eliminate all the duplicate data entry steps. In addition, the public now has access to more information than they used to before because they can click on the measure name and actually see the chart of the monthly data. To keep things simple, we do not go into as much detail with operational data as we do with our strategic performance measures, but we do make sure that our measure names are self explanatory. So in conclusion, we believe that our performance management system works and it works because it serves a purpose. It is integrated into our processes throughout our organization and we do communicate our strategy and performance both internally and externally.

Thank you.

Great. Laura and Mike, thank you very much. I'm going to try to get Tracy back on the line in just a second. Tracy, I think you were unmuted, but before I ask, before I look at the questions, I wanted to just very quickly say, you know, just again kind of re emphasize some of the things that you heard is both Tamarac and Sarasota are managing their strategic plans in clearpoint. Their community dashboards that their citizens see are also shown and published out of clearpoint for the public to see. And then we have a relatively new, since early 2017, a measures library to allow people to network and share best practices as well. So in this measures library you can search across municipalities for ones that are your size. You can also filter down either by keyword or program area like culture, recreation, health or planning and compliance or finances, or you can just type in any word and do full text searching. And then you can see how organizations like Tamarack or Sarasota county are measuring particular items and see the names of the individuals who are doing that measurement. So it's always up to date. And then those of you that are tracking, last month ICMA released a lot of their data in spreadsheet format. So we took all of it and pulled it into our measures library as well. So if you were using any of their data in the past, you can reference that data, see not only their high level averages, but also the detailed reporting of any of the municipalities who were participating in that as well. So with that we do have another minute or two for some questions and I would like to ask a question for both Tamarack and Sarasota is in thinking about change your performance management system. I know at Sarasota there's been a recent change in leadership at the top and from your presentation, Tracy, sounds like several changes over the years. But also I know within Tamarack there are changes in leadership that are not necessarily the city manager changes, but heads of departments and changes in that area. So I'd like to hear how you view the performance management system. You know, what role does it Play during those times of change.

Mike, do you want to go first?

Sure.

Thank you, Tracy. So, Ted, I think that that's an excellent question, and I want to go back. I want to start by saying our strategic plan is a living document. And we spend a day with our elected officials every year on the strategic plan, reviewing it, reviewing what the goals are, making sure they continue to be relevant to the elected officials in the eyes of the community. And then we continue through the year with quarterly updates with our elected officials and our executive team, making sure that our performance is what it needs to be and that we're continuing to meet the goals that are set in the strategic plan. And by doing that, having those quarterly updates and sharing this data on a very regular basis with the community leaders, with the elected officials, with our department directors, the data that we use and the commitment to the plan really has, in our case, taken on the effect of driving our budget process, driving our resource decisions, driving our capital plan. And the reason why that's important in terms of changes in leadership, whether it be with the elected officials or whether it be city manager, county administrator, department director, is that it continues that buy in that is so necessary in a process like this. From top to bottom, from bottom to top, everything revolves around the strategic plan. And the performance management really becomes that link between everything that you're doing in a year. The budget process, the capital improvement process, your fees and your assessments, those performance metrics that you share, really drive all of that and really make the case every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year as we go through the process. And for me, in terms of changes in leadership or buy in, the key is really to continue to communicate how important it is and how you're doing on a very regular basis. As I said, we spend a day every year with the commission on the strategic plan. We spend at least six hours every quarter, quarter with them, doing updates of where we are with the plan, where we are financially, and then we talk about it quarterly with our executive team. And our department directors utilize their own personnel on a very regular basis to talk about the measures and that they're continuing to be relevant at the division level and at the department level.

Great. Tracy?

Yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think Mike offered a really good external look, certainly how you would communicate it to the public and to the elected body. I think for us here, it really has been about that culture shift I mentioned. We needed departmental ownership of performance management, and we decided we would do it as my performance team said to me last week without baseball bats. So we're going to do it in a positive way where the data tells our story and we're not afraid of reds and yellows but yet we embrace those as opportunities for change. And because we have the buy in we have today where it's positive and not punitive, it really doesn't matter who's in the seat because enough people really buy into the notion that the data helps them to do their work and deliver the best service possible to the community.

Great. Well with that I think we are actually a little bit over time so if anyone has any additional questions feel free to email them in. We will pass them out to the speakers and we are recording this session so there will be a copy of it on our website soon. Laura, Mike, Tracy, thank you very much. We really appreciate you doing this and look forward to hearing more about your success.

Thank you. Thank you.