ClearPoint Strategy Texas Municipal Webinar

So, hello everybody. My name is Ted Jackson. I'm a managing partner here at clearpoint. And today we're going to be talking about managing performance and transparency in municipalities. We're going to be focused in Texas, so we're going to have both Austin Resource Recovery from the City of Austin and Fort Worth speaking. I have Shanna Revello and Amethyst Sloan on the line who will give presentations and then we will open it up for questions. So before we get started, for those of you that do not know us here at clearpoint, we help municipalities improve their strategic performance. We do that in three different ways. We help manage strategic plans through our tool called clearpoint. We help you with community dashboards, which are public facing dashboards for citizens. And we have a measures library to help you network with other municipalities in sharing best practices. So I'll show you a little bit on the last two at the end if we have time. But today we're really focused on really the business practices or the best practices in managing performance. So with no further ado, I would like to introduce Shanna Revello, a business process consultant from Austin Resource Recovery.

Shanna, Good morning, everybody. Thank you for your time. I just want to kind of talk about what Austin Resource Recovery does, performance measure wise, and how we're utilizing clinical. So the first few slides will give you a little history on what our department does. As Ted mentioned, we are a department within the city of Austin. You can go to the next slide. TED and we provide a wide range of services to keep the community clean. These include things such as organics collection, garbage collection, recycling collection, and we also have different reuse drop off centers as well. So the city of Austin as a whole is committed to providing citizens with the best service possible, which includes providing open data so the citizens can see why we're doing what we're doing, how we allocate our resources, what our budget is, how our performance measures tie into that, which I'll get into in a second. So it kind of motivates our department specifically and the rest of the city as well, to make sure all the data and the information that we have is as accurate and transparent and visible as possible. So the city as a whole uses what's called performance based budgeting, which I'm sure most of y' all are familiar with. Essentially, it means that we have performance measures that indicate how we're performing in each department in each division, and that ties into how our resources are allocated, how our budget is allocated, and helps with our performance management process when it comes Time for a new fiscal year and determining what resources go where. So this is an example of our public facing performance measure website. It shows our overall budget, the different allocations, and it also tells you towards the bottom. You can see it ties all the way down to individual performance measures. And if you click on those, you can see the data associated as well. So, like I said, we try to have an open data policy for all the citizens so they can go in and get the information they need and answer any questions they have with our budget. As I mentioned, having accurate data is very crucial for budgeting, staffing, everything else related to that. So that's kind of an overview of who we are as a department. And now I'll get into specifically how we chose to utilize clearpoint to tackle those business practices and the performance management side of things. So this first slide here is showing an executive dashboard. We chose to take this approach and you can see these four gauges. So within our department, we have about nine divisions and we have this overall dashboard that has a gauge for each division representing how they're doing strictly related to the performance measures. So each gauge is a cumulative fiscal average of all the performance measures tied into each division. And what we use this for, we will send it to our executive team quarterly so they can kind of see how we're doing throughout the year, performance measure wise. And as you can see with the red, yellow and green on each gauge, it provides easy identification of a potential problem. So if we sent this out and it was midway through the fiscal year and you see operations support. Oh, there in yellow, we might want to look into what's going on there. If it's a problem we can rectify before the end of the fiscal year, or if it's strictly a problem that needs to be recognized, maybe we need more resources in that area. It also kind of works the other way around. You can see Safety is at 95% all the way in green. So maybe their goals aren't set properly. If they're already at 95%, we're only halfway through. Is that really an accurate representation? Should we maybe look at reevaluating their goal for the next fiscal year? Next slide? Yeah. So if you click on a gauge, you can also drill down and to see all the measures that are tied into that division. So it will give you more specifics. Related. Okay, why was operations support in yellow? And here it has all the performance measures that are tied to that particular division and each of them have status indicators as well. So you can easily see, okay, I see a yellow performance measure, and I see a red performance measure. Those might be ones that we need to delve a little further into and from the executive team level. This is great because they can get the snapshot view of the gauges, but then if they decide I need a little more information, they can get as much or as little information as they would like. And then this is delving down even further. So if I were to click on that red performance measure, you can see the owner, which is who's responsible for entering that data, the division it belongs to, the identification number, which is just something our department uses, and then the variance justification. So because data fluctuates, we created a specific field so we can tell what's going on. So the owner would be responsible for going in and putting a reason as to why was there data fluctuation. Why are we currently in red? Is it something the executive team needs to help with? Is it something we're working on correcting? Or is it something, like I previously said, that needs to be factored in when we're planning for our next fiscal year? So this next section is a new use that we're currently. So this is the current business process, but we're kind of converting it over to clearpoint at the moment. It's what's known as our ZWACK Report. So ZWAC stands for our Zero Waste Advisory Commission, and they are a boards and commission here in the city of Austin that reviews resources related to solid waste management and basically advises council on decisions that need to be made related to this as well. So our department, Austin Resource Recovery, is currently responsible for creating reports for that commission each month that give an overview of our department's performance, and there's certain key performance indicators they want to see on there. I'll get more into the specifics when I show you an example of the report. But currently what we're looking at doing is, is putting this into clearpoint versus the previous Excel calculations that were done. Since all our performance measures are already housed in clearpoint, we felt like that would be a more efficient use of our time to go ahead and have the report in there as well. So this is an example of part of the report. It's a pretty lengthy report. It involves both graphs and raw data. And you can see the top. There is a comparison. Well, they're both comparison charts. It varies. There's monthly comparisons they want to see. The bottom one is fiscal year to date comparison. And basically overall, it portrays an overview of our performance and our progression towards zero Waste. Using this, we were able to eliminate a lot of previous information that was done in Excel. So performance measure data would be pulled and calculated in Excel, and then a report would be created in Excel. Our hope when this is finalized is that there won't need to be any work in Excel. We can just take our performance measure data in clearpoint, add in a few other calculations, and generate this report, all in clearpoint. And then lastly, we have some other possibilities that we're looking at as far as adding different business processes from Austin Resource Recovery into clearpoint. I touched on a few of these already. One specifically I want to touch on are the internal scorecards. So a lot of our divisions currently keep track of different data points that they might want to look at turning into performance measures in the future. And so something our team has looked at doing is creating kind of little scorecards for them within clearpoint so they can track that data and then we can make the decision later of should we turn this into a performance measure, or what story are we trying to tell with this, or figure out another way to integrate it into our budget and our performance measures. So that is basically a quick overview of how we're currently utilizing clearpoint and our associated business processes.

Great. Shanna, thank you very much. I know I've heard the 30 minute version of this, and it still feels like it's moving quickly, so I'm, I'm sure there'll be some questions. I was jotting down a few myself, so. But in the interest of time, I wanted to jump ahead to Amethyst. Amethyst Sloan, the Performance Administrator at the city of Fort Worth, Texas.

Okay, thanks for having me, Ted. I appreciate it. And for those of you who are here from Fort Worth, hopefully some of this will look familiar to you. So I'm going to talk about performance management from a little bit different perspective than Shauna did. So at the end, I'll talk a little bit about how we're using clearpoint to get us there, but I'm going to talk big picture about kind of how we got to where we are today. So, next slide.

TED.

So the performance office at the city of Fort Worth has now existed for about four years. I've been here for three of them. One of my charges when I got here was, you know, we need a way to start strategically managing performance tracking information so that we have a way to look at the organization to see if we're doing the things that we should be doing, if we're tracking the right information that tells us whether or not we're performing well. So we kind of had to take a look at, you know, what were we doing when I got here, our department's already doing things. The organization already had plans in place. Who's doing those things, if at all, who's responsible? So, for example, we had some old comprehensive reports that had measures in them. We had some business plans that had measures in them. So it was kind of a chance for us to restart and say, what do we really need going forward? And how can we use any processes that are currently being used to slide forward into with a little bit of a new perspective? So looking across the organization, when I got here, I found that we had, you know, we're not a strategic plan organization. We don't have a traditional strategic plan. We work more with the city manager's work plan and some council goals. We had a little bit of a framework. We did have department plans. So each department was putting together what they were calling a business plan. But there was no common approach to that. So they looked different, they felt different, they were organized differently. For some of them had measures, kind.

Of, Some of them had data, kind.

Of, but they weren't particularly strategically organized.

So we decided that that would be.

A great place to get a quick win. So departments do have plans, but they're not. There isn't a common approach to those. So why don't we create a plan with a common approach that all departments are tackling those items the same way to get that common framework in? So what we did is we created something new called the Department of Business performance plans, or BPPs. So previously, what departments had been doing is they each kind of had their own plan. At the very end of the plan was kind of a laundry list of things of data that they tracked measures, but they weren't aligned anywhere else in the organization. Or some of them were aligned to work plan items. Some of them were aligned to a council goal. There wasn't any standard way to look at that. So we created a new document called the Business Performance Plan, which included a whole bunch of items and SWOT analysis and KPIs. And we had departments think about themselves in a new way. And the idea behind the Business Performance Plan was that if all departments are doing this in the same way, some of the information in this plan we can then translate to scorecards. So that's kind of later we brought clearpoint in.

So.

So the framework in the Business Performance Plan we kind of replicated in clearpoint that is today giving us our scorecard. So the BPP the business performance plan is flexible enough so that we can. Right now we have areas that are currently in the BPPs that are aligned to management plan core objectives. We plan on cascading that up to strategic plans, other plans, city manager's work plan going forward, and also cascading down to work units or employee plans. So each employee should know within their department, which service area are the tasks that I perform on a daily basis related to. Okay, next item. So how we organize the business performance plans is we ask departments to break themselves into functional divisions and then for each of those functional divisions, come up with kind of a handful of service areas. You know, what are the key services that you provide in that functional division? And then within each service area, what are a handful of key performance indicators that tell you whether or not the services you're providing are doing what you want them to do? It was this organization that we really translated into performance scorecards and clearpoint, and we also encouraged departments when they were setting themselves up. Your functional divisions don't have to look like your org chart. So as an organization, we're more interested in what you're doing versus who on the org chart happens to be performing that activity, each of the service areas. So how we were able to align this to next level strategy up the organization. So management plan core objectives. And we're actually shifting that this year we're moving away from the management plan and we're going to move towards something called key focus areas. Each service area itself is aligned to a management plan core objective or one of the key focus areas. That way, in the performance office, we can take one of those core objectives or a key focus area and say, well, what are all of the service areas across the entire organization that align here and how are they performing? Once departments develop their service areas, they all went through a series of training sessions on key performance indicator development. So their service areas, we had them dissect them into, well, what are the key programs and services we offer in this service area? Who are our key customers? What are their expectations? What are our inputs and outputs? We really wanted to try to set a pretty good baseline for measures we were going to start with. So going through this training process really helped dig in, identify identifying customers and expectations have led to better key performance indicators across the organization. So then we had BPPs, we had the new business performance plans. They were organized in a new way. Departments had developed key performance indicators, started looking at the data they thought they wanted to track, and we translated that into scorecards. So for each of the key performance indicators that departments identified, we had them fill out what's called a measure detail sheet. So this sheet asks, what's the definition of this measure? What are the terms that you're using? What's the calculation for this measure? What's your target for next year? Is your target varying over seasons? So that my department could use these as kind of the Legos to build the ClearPoint system for the first round. Going through this exercise of having to fill out this measure detail sheet for each KPI actually caused a lot of departments to go back and rethink their KPIs. When they were writing the descriptions for them, they noticed, well, we're not really sure this is what this means, or maybe our target needs to be set based on something different. That was helpful as well. So our scorecard. Not sure if you can quite see that here, but back in the business performance plan I mentioned, they had those divisions, service areas and measures. That's exactly what the department scorecards look like. So it's a one for one directly from the bpp. Our goal at the end is to get away from the paper business performance plan and put everything in clearpoint so that we can produce that BPP at the end of the year. I'm hoping that we'll get there next year. As far as clearpoint, so we are actually using the clearpoint data loader. We needed to figure out a way to get data in the system quickly, try to connect to systems or figure out what that looked like. So we spread this over all of our departments. We got about 23 departments here. So each department has two performance liaisons who kind of manage the process. They're the ones that have access to clearpoint, make sure the information is there. And we actually have about 200 and some odd data owners across the city. So what we are doing is we have spreadsheets set up so that data owners can actually enter in their data on a regular basis and then that's automatically fed to the Clearpoint system so that we don't have to have 400 user licenses across the city. Licenses are limited to performance liaisons, which helps us with training, but having the data owners of the information actually input that information really spreads that accountability across the organization. The more people that touch that process and that are aware of what's going on are better able to kind of describe what's going on. And we'll look at the scorecards on a regular basis. So who does what? Program accountability. So I talked about this a minute ago. So we have about 50 performance liaisons and a whole bunch of data owners in the performance office. We're kind of focused on citywide strategy. We do a little bit of training, make sure liaisons know how to use the system and we do other training on good measure development as well. Performance liaisons and departments, they're responsible for managing their data owners, making sure the spreadsheets are updated, making sure, like Shauna said, for them they have that variance analysis.

We have a place for that too.

You know, why is your data what it is, what's happened recently to explain what's going on? And the data owners themselves are just responsible for actually entering the information. We provide training basic clearpoint training every six months and then we're starting to provide more ad hoc training on advanced topics to liaisons as well. So since we started, our scorecards have been up and running for a little over two years now. The first year almost three.

Oh wow.

I keep forgetting how long I've been here. We got about 82% inputting data into the Clearpoint system within year one. So we now have all departments scorecards are up and running. We had 23 departments, 70 divisions, 172 service areas and 340 key performance indicators in the system. So we're doing pretty well. And that's actually numbers going to jump a little bit more with KPIs as we start fiscal year 18. So what's happening next? So last year we published our scorecard to our intranet so that any employee in the organization can take a look at any measure, any division, any service area at any time. Clearpoint really helped us create a report that works well for us. We publish it monthly. Again, I mentioned earlier, we're shifting from the management plan to some key focus areas, trying to get people to think about things more strategically and, and also to look at their KPIs as a place for process improvement. You know, where areas that we're not doing very well, maybe we need to bring in or send somebody to Lean Six Sigma training to dive into that area a little bit more deeply. And we're also launching a public dashboard this fall. We're not using clearpoint for the first round, but we do intend to build it up in clearpoint for our public display next year. So that's something that we're looking forward to doing as well. So overall we kind of morph from not really having a strategic way to look at things, getting that business performance plan in place, linking it to higher level objectives of the city, and then also including things like A public facing dashboard going forward. And a lot of our work has focused on getting data owners trained up, getting performance liaisons trained up so that information is correct in the system so we can start sending out reports on a regular basis to, at the division level, the department level, and more strategic areas. So we've had a lot of success with it so far. We're constantly encouraging folks to use it in different ways. Some departments review their scorecard every month, some review it quarterly, some review it with their assistant city manager, et cetera. So there are a lot of opportunities for dissemination throughout the organization.

Great. Thank you, Amethyst. And thank you, Shanna. I'm going to actually, I'm going to try to take everybody off mute to allow people to ask questions, but I'm going to start while everyone's still on mute by asking the first question. So I really want to. It's kind of a question for you both, but I want to start with Amethyst because it looks like you were able to get 23 departments kind of all marching to the same drum, you know, in very short order. So I'd like to hear about, you know, how that happened, was there any resistance and whatnot. And then, Shanna, for you, you know, your story is great and really deep on how you're, you're going down through Austin Resource Recovery, but I'd be curious as to whether you're seeing, you know, similar things that, that Amethyst described at the beginning of her journey with Fort Worth two plus years ago.

Sure. So this is Amethyst. When we started out, we pretty much took one entire year to deploy the program. So we developed the business performance plans. We had those training sessions I mentioned with each department. There were about three half day training sessions for each department. With 23 departments, you can see how.

That adds up real quick.

It was fairly time intensive, but we wanted everyone to start off with the same idea in mind. So even that's why we went all the way back to most of the training really focused on development of good key performance indicators. So getting back to those inputs, outputs and outcomes, trying to get the organization to that outcome level. So stepping back to revisit those items. Of course there's always a little, I don't know if resistance is the right word. I just think it takes people used to getting to do things a new way. We're starting to incorporate the business performance plan more into our budget conversations as well. So I think as folks see business performance plans and scorecards being used in those conversations, it's really helping people get to the next level with their measures to make sure they have the right information in there that's going to help drive their budget and resource direction conversations as well. Those training sessions we had really put everyone on level playing field to start that way departments could talk to. So one of the things that benefits me is now I have these 50 performance liaisons across the city. They can talk to one another about challenges they're having either with getting information or having the right measures. So they're not always reliant on the performance office too. We're kind of building that team across the city.

Excellent, Shannon.

So ours is of course, on a smaller scale since it's just within our department. But that being said, whenever we made the switch in our business process to utilize clearpoint to provide more visual and visible data to the executive team, we did have to get all of the divisions on the same page and kind of create a standard process. So in order to set up clearpoint, it probably took us, I would say, close to six months. What we chose to do is have each division represented with a division representative who would be responsible for entering in the performance measure data within clearpoint. And then someone on my team is kind of responsible for overseeing that process. So we created a memo that outlined the process. We would follow any deadlines and kind of explanations as to why we were doing what we were doing. So everyone was aware. Like Amethyst said, hesitation was there just because it is a change in process. But I mean, and when you see your division and it has a yellow or red on this gauge that the executive team is looking at, there's going to be hesitation. But when we kind of explained this is going to be used for planning future goals, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you need more resources, maybe you need it to reflect red. Everybody pretty much got on the same page now. It's pretty smooth sailing. So it's worked out well. And having a standard process in place is really helpful to help us meet all of our deadlines.

Okay, great for both of you. It sounds like there's a really. You've really benefited by standardizing the way that you were operating. I know that software can help with that, but at minimum, you just need the standard product and then show each of the groups individually what the benefit is to them for kind of being on this standard approach. And I think it really, really helps. Now I'm realizing that we're probably going to be out of time before we can take other questions. So let me, let me just quickly jump ahead a slide. So as I said before, what clearpoint does and what Shanna and Amethyst have been talking about is kind of managing their municipal strategic plans. Over here, the dashboards you saw a little bit with the way that Austin is using theirs internally with those gauge charts for people to see. And Fort Worth is talking about building it externally as well and then integrating clearpoint into that. And then we also network with others doing best practices. So just another Texas example of a public facing dashboard is the city of Sugar Land has just put all of their performance measures, their key performance measures for their citizens to see and have an interactive way to drill down and get that information. It is all fed from there Clear Point system. And then we didn't really talk about this today because it wasn't the focus of this webinar, but what we have is a municipal measures library where our different municipalities have been contributing measures that they're actively using to manage their strategy with. So the library now is over 340 measures. It's searchable by keywords and just by full text. And just for everyone on this call's benefit, we have also earlier this month added all of the recently released ICMA measures and data associated with it. So there are ways that municipalities can work together to see what each other are doing, network with individuals. Hopefully this webinar will help with that, but we're also trying to build it into some of the tools that we have. So we are out of time. I definitely wanted to thank Shanna and Amethyst and since we are recording this, we will be in the next day or so emailing out a recording and posting it for those of you that may have missed it or want to review the information again. So thank you very much. We greatly appreciate your time and hope you have a great day.

Thank you.