Performance Management in the City of Durham, NC

Yeah.

Hello, everyone, my name is Shepard Smith, part of the marketing team here at clearpoint and like to thank you for joining us to discuss performance and strategy innovations at the City of Durham. This webinar is set up in a manner I think everyone's familiar with. The audience is muted, but we encourage questions and comments and ask you to please submit those at any point using the Questions tab. We have two speakers today. Sherry Metcalfe is strategy and Performance Manager at the City of Durham. Sherry has deep experience at City of Durham and she was originally a budget analyst and now leads everything related to strategy, reporting and performance management. Interviewing Sherry will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint's two founders. And there's no one on this planet who knows more about strategy reporting software. After the interview, Ted will provide a quick interview of clearpoint, which is the system used by City of Durham and many other local governments. Ted, I'll now turn the presentation over to you.

Great. Thanks, Shepard. And Sherry, great to see you again.

Good to see you.

Tell me a little bit. I know you've been in your role at Durham and I've been over here at clearpoint for quite a long time, but why don't you give us a short history of how performance management has been working at the City of Durham.

Sure. So I came to City of Durham about nine years ago, and when I got here, we were already with clearpoint. We were managing our strategic strategic plans, or citywide strategic plan, the dashboard, but everything else related to performance. So metrics and charts and all that kind of good stuff was all being done on Excel spreadsheets. And I was a budget analyst back in the day. So I do love a good Excel spreadsheet. But this, these were a lot of spreadsheets. So every department had their own. There were tabs for each work unit, you know, so you can imagine for the larger departments, it was a very large spreadsheet. We had hundreds and hundreds of performance metrics. So it's very hard to manage, if not really impossible. We'd ask for monthly and quarterly updates. But that was my job when I first got here, was to manage all of this. And I was like, how do I manage? I can't tell you who did what and when. And we used to use the data all over the place, which was great, right? That's what you want to do. So we use the data in budget books and in presentations to City Manager and to City council, but it was really cumbersome to move that data around. So really, I think a big turning point for Us here in Durham, for our performance management was getting a system that we could actually use to manage all of that data. That took a while, you know, took a long time to do that. But once we were in, we've been, it's. It was impossible to do before. I mean, let's be honest, we had, I think, common for a lot of organizations when they start looking at their department measures, they have too many measures, or at least that's when I talk to people, that seems to be a common issue. And that's where we were at that time. We have, we probably cut down our number of measures almost in half over nine years, just because at that stage we were measuring everything. But. Yeah, so that's a brief history. So we, you know. Well, we could use clearpoint for a lot more than that now, but that was where we were about nine years ago. So we've come a long way.

If I remember when you, when you started there, I feel like the departments were being told what to measure in some area and there was some resistance to that. Do you remember how that process turned around or how you managed to get buy in across your departments?

So when we were using those spreadsheets, one of the big challenges that just to drive people crazy is that we would tell them to put their data in these Excel spreadsheets. And then we tell them, now we need you to take that data and put it into a Word document for the budget book. Oh, and then now we need it in a PowerPoint for the city manager and three months later we need it again in a PowerPoint for the city council. Then of course the numbers wouldn't match. And then it was just frustration for everyone, especially in the departments. And so when we moved into clearpoint, into putting them all in one place, we did it very slowly. I don't know if you remember that it took us a good year and a half to get all of our departments in there. And we did that because we had a buy in issue. We had, we had an executive, you know, we had a city manager and executive team that was all about this. Like, we always had their support, which was, which was great. I mean, that's like probably the biggest battle right there. So that was not an issue. It was, you know, the staff had gotten a little worn down by tracking all of these measures and all the issues that went with that. And so when we rolled out clearpoint, moving all these measures in, it was very much a slow process. We did a lot of hand holding. We went department by department and that helped A lot in the buy in we cleared out a lot of measures. We made sure people understood what the heck they were measuring and why. Like, you know, you're measuring this but what are you doing with it? And a lot of times we heard, I don't know what, I don't know what you're doing, I don't know why I'm measuring it. That helps a lot. And then because it was in one place, we use the same data. Like we don't need to ask them for a budget book because we just get it from one system. Right. We don't need it for, for presentations. Right. Just tell us which ones you want to show because we just grab it from the same place. And so people who are around before and after, they really appreciated that. And that went a long way for the buy in. And I think too making it more, it's just, it was just easier, was less time, less time putting numbers in a system and more time actually looking at the numbers and making decisions based on those. So that was a big part of the buy in.

Yeah. Great. And you, you have like a three year planning cycle at Durham. Can you explain how that works?

Sure.

Overall, like what happens?

I love our three year plan, but as we all know, things can happen in those three years. But our three year plan is we do a citywide strategic plan in one year and then we go right into department business plans which of course come from the citywide plan. And then that third year is really about performance measures and cleaning up things and evaluating, evaluating kind of what we're doing. It's a time to kind of prepare for the next three years. Right. But you know, we look at measures all the time. I mean I get emails all the time from people. Oh, you know, can we look at these? I don't think we need these anymore. So that happens all the time. That third year is really a deep dive into measures that are missing methodology. Do people know? Like, you know, I'm sure we're so alone in Durham with this, but we've had a little bit of turnover in the last year or so and those methodologies of how this information is collected has been so important and we've seen a little, some holes in that area that we need to work on. But that's really the goal in that year three is to just really a deep dive evaluation of those performance metrics. So that is, that is what I would love to do. Like that's our dream. We have it on the wall, you know, our three year plan. So. But we're in year one now, so we're, we are hopeful that we can, we can back on track.

And you push all of this into clearpoint. Like do you put those definitions, the methodologies.

Yep, methodologies are all in clearpoint. One of the best things we can do a report and instantly know who's missing a methodology. It's an easy way to find out who we need to contact. But yes, all of that's in there. We'll be building out our department business plans in there. Our street strategic plan of course will be in there. But yeah, and we use the same measures. Right. So a lot of the measures that departments use, just as their everyday measures are not every, but you know, they're tracking are in our citywide plan as well as business plans. And so they're all in the same place, which makes it very convenient for.

Everyone, I was going to say for our clients that are using clearpoint. If you ever see in the filter. Filter where this field equals blank and you wonder why you would use that. That's a, that's a very good example of it. Because you can find where you have holes or gaps and, and what you should do. Now you alluded earlier that you're using, you know, the same data in, in multiple places so you don't have to, I'll use the word, you don't have to harass your departments as much about those reports. Can you tell us about like the internal dashboards that you've created or other, I'll call it broad based term dashboards that you use kind of across the city?

Sure. We, I mean we have our outward facing dashboard for our strategic plan. Although if you go in there now, it, it, it looks a little different because we're in the process of redoing our strategic plan. But we always, normally, we always have that on our outward facing dashboard. Right now our big outward facing dashboard is related to our sustainability plan, which is our, it's built in Clearpoint and it's being managed in Clearpoint. But we have it, it's a pretty simple dashboard. It's directly linked to clearpoint. So we pretty much have set up a dashboard in clearpoint. We just have it linked to a page off of a website and things like that. So it's a very simple. But one we did internally, which was nice. Well, we just did it here in the city very quickly. So. But we do have some internal dashboards. Some different departments have dashboards set up for their staff meetings. This got really important, especially when they were doing them all virtual during that time, I think a lot of them are still doing it virtual but having that one place to look at. Across the board we have a couple super users. I wish I could clone them, but we have some super users in departments that use dashboards, gosh, all the way down to the division level. So they're by their supervisors. They've built those themselves and done a great job. And we, but we have a little bit of work to do in the dashboards. You know, we have, there's stuff we'd like to do we just haven't done yet with regards to that. So. But we're growing and we're excited about our new strategic plan because we have big plans for our, our dashboard for next summer. So we're already starting to brainstorm on that one.

Oh good. Well, we got a question in from an audience member about your strategic plan. And they said, is it a long term plan that you take three years to prepare or is it a plan that looks over three years? You call it a three year plan. What does that really mean?

Right, yes, sorry, yes, our strategic plan, it takes a year to plan, but three years to carry out. So we do a lot of looking at every city. We have so many long term plans, the comp plan and all kinds of long term plans. We look at all of those and we take bits and pieces of things that we want to prioritize over the next three years and then there's things that are not in any long term plan that also are in the strategic plan, of course. But yeah, we take about nine months to put our strategic plan together and that's what we're doing now for this refresh and it lasts three years. So the end of those three years we'll be doing another refresh. So it's really like what are we going to highly like really focus in on? We have really quick, we have these monthly meetings with our executive team, executive roundtable group and they look at the initiatives that are in our plan. So there, you know, our city manager is spending two hours a month looking at these strategic initiatives. So it's really on. What do we want to focus on? Like what can we accomplish in the next three years?

Right, okay. Well what, you know, I know as a, as a city that's inside of a county and you're the primary city.

And so the only city.

The only city.

So here.

But yes, inside of Durham county, how much information do you share, you know, with them? Like how do you all work together?

Yeah, so luckily they use clearpoint as well. But even before they were using clearpoint, we shared, you can share information. So we have departments that are owned, they're controlled by both county and city. We split the cost. But like the city may manage this one, but the county may manage that one. So it makes it really easy. I mean, there's a way in clearpoint, right, where you can share across all kinds of different organizations with their data. So we just simply share with the, with the people over at the county, which makes it really nice because of course, you know, we try to make things more complicated here. The county, they have their own measures that they use. They show it differently. They, you know, at different times. And so it's very convenient just to have it in one central location. They want it, they can come see it. When we want it, we can go see theirs. Works out very well.

Yeah, it's one of the nice things about the way clearpoint works is you can create groupings of organizations and sometimes it's a big group of 20 organizations. In your case, you also have this, you know, two person or two organization, you know, the Durham City and Durham county together. So you can share whatever you want, but they can also manage all of their additional things that don't affect you as much. They can do all that.

We actually shared a person for a long time. We had an ICMA fellow that the county and the city shared and I supervised them. Someone in the county supervised them half the time and we were able to write measures for them and share that information across so we could all see it. Yeah, it was very nice.

Right, good. Another question about your KPIs on your strategic plan. Would you call them operational or strategic and. Well, I'll just leave it at that.

Yeah, it's a combination. It's a combination. I think a couple strategic plans ago there were much more outcome related and then we got a little bit more specific to more operational. And I don't know if there's, I don't know if it can all be one or the other. So we definitely have a combination. It's such a good question. Is that your question or did someone else ask that question?

It was asked, sorry, good question.

We're already talking about how this is going to look for us with this plan because we think we went a little too operational in our last one and so we need to come up a little bit. But the challenge of course is that departments want to be able to own their measures. Like they want to say, but I influence this, you know, 100%, which a lot of the Measures that we want to look at with regards to our strategic plan. Like departments have an impact on. They may not be, you know, the only one, the only group in town that hasn't, you know, really influences. So it's a challenge for us. But at the moment I'd say it's a hybrid approach. We're using both.

Yeah, it's a little, it follows a little bit of kind of original Norton Kaplan thinking of leading and lagging indicators. Right, right. So you're, your operational items are things that you can measure on a monthly basis, probably even more frequently if you needed to, but you could report on them on a monthly basis. And your strategic measures might be things that you can only get a glimpse into annually or every few years. And as you said, you know, even though you're, you might have a whole department working on homeless problems and Durham, they're not the only thing that impacts that. So they need to look at their operational measures while they're trying to impact those longer term strategic measures.

I think with our new plan too, that we're looking at more of those bigger kind of measures for the plan. And when we start talking about initiatives, we want groups to put more of those operational measures in there because when we talk about the initiatives of these meetings that we have with City Manager, we want to show the data. So that's more of these operational monthly measures showing how they're moving, they're progressing forward. Yeah, but it's all in my head because we just had a conversation about it here, about the refresh, but.

Oh, great. So you talked earlier about using like having all of your data in one place and not having to create other reports. So it means you're probably using clearpoint for more than just strategic planning. So what other things do you do with the information that you have?

Yeah, so we have built, we've built pages in there for the budget book. So it's, it's a, we just do every year the budget tells me when they need it and I make sure people, you know, send an email time people, don't forget to update your measures. The pages are built. So I just do a PDF straight from clearpoint and that PDF just becomes part of the budget book. So that, that was a big deal because there was a lot of work that went into our performance page in the book before that, our City Manager budget presentations are actually, it's not a PowerPoint, it's actually straight out of Clearpoint. That way when the City Manager asks questions about methodology or history or they have different, you Know, we can go right into the measure and it's all that information is right there. So that's been really. That's been great. We also use it for work plans. A lot of department work plans are in there, which makes it nice because a lot of their department business plan initiatives are part of the work plan. So it's all linked. I mean, really, the linking is, is the best part, right? Because everything is related. But yeah, we use it for our work plans. We use it for individual people have built. I have my work plan in there that I built. But so we have a lot of that. We've also gotten into milestones, which we didn't use until the last couple years, but we've been using a lot of the milestones and the Gantt charts on the initiatives that we find really helpful. We're actually going to bring that in a lot more in this next plan because people found it so helpful to have these milestones listed and who owns them and, you know, all of that. So.

Meaning. So in your work plan, you're putting in like targets and you're able to see in the Gantt chart how long.

In the Gantt chart. Yeah, and it's, it's an easy. I just, I love the Gantt chart because it's just, it's easy, it's simple. You know, it's not. I mean, our people that are doing massive projects, they're not using the Gantt chart in clearpoint. But I mean, for, for our use, though, and for these initiative, it, it's perfect. It's easy enough for people to get in, do what they need to do. They color code it, they do a time frame, you know. Yeah, works perfect. We hope to use it more in this next plan for sure.

So I don't mean for this to be a leading question or anything, but we started with you saying people really hated all the mandatory reporting and didn't know what they were reporting. But now I'm hearing you say, well, we're doing work plans, we do our budget book. So a lot of that has to be mandated. Right. To get them to do all of that in there. But if I were to lead you and say they must be getting value out of this because otherwise, like, it sounds like they're doing it maybe with joy.

They don't complain too much. They don't complain too much. Yeah. So there's different things, right? I mean, the budget book was being done before, so this made it easier. So people are like, sure, I can do that. That's way easier. Than what we used to do. I think where people find the most benefit is. Is so we have. We've linked performance measures into our budget requests. It's not perfect, but we feel pretty good about it. Where they need to provide a case of why they want more money for something or why they want to make a change. And so same manager has been pretty clear, like, you need to have data, you need to show some data, use the data. Is that evidence to prove why you need it? And I think that's where we get a lot of people appreciating, just appreciating having it because that's what they use. They go to that. Our budget analysts go into the system to do their analysis of whether or not they're approving different things. They look at the data, they ask questions about the data. And I think that's when we have the best conversations with departments where they see the value in it. They just, they kind of get it. So there's the, oh, it's just easier. We have to do this. So it's easier this way. So that's great. But then there's also the, oh, I get it. Like, this is why we do this, because this is, you know, this is what we're doing with that data. This is why it's so important.

Right. So it sounds like it's more integrated in with your essential processes versus the way it was before. It was like a separate item that you would still have to transition into your essential processes. Now it's kind of a part.

And I think anyone that does strategic planning knows that integration is so important because if it's completely separate. Right. That's why they collect dust on the side where we try to integrate it into as many things as we can. This new one is going to be integrated into our. We call it EPAP anyway, our evaluation, our employee evaluation system where we have smart goals and these, you know, things that were evaluated on. And so we're trying to get that linked. That's kind of the last thing that we've been wanting to do and we haven't done yet to really link that to different business. It'll probably be more of the business plans that it's linked to, but that integration is key for sure.

So integration, integration with business plans, what else do you. When you think into the future of how you might leverage this? Any other things that you could imagine using clearpoint for?

So ARPA just came from a city council work session. We're talking about arpa. I know that has. You guys have done A lot of work with that. And we're counting on using ARPA as a big part of how we track the measures related to that. We definitely want to do that. These business plans that we're rolling out next year, we definitely want to use more of the reporting process in clearpoint for that. We were. It's not been our strength in the past. We were really great in getting people to have a plan and helping them do it, but we didn't do a lot. Just capacity issues. We weren't. We didn't do a whole lot after the business plan was created. And so we plan on using a lot of reporting out and yeah, that kind of end dashboards. Right. To help us in that area and then our external dashboard. Because I'm excited about a new dashboard, our strategic plan coming out next summer. That's a big one for us. But I mean, there's always room for improvement. Always, Always. So there's always new things, new things to try, see if we can do it better, make it easier.

Good. So a couple of questions have come in while we've been chatting. One is, how many people do you have on your strategy team versus total number of people in your organization? Just trying to see how clearpoint supports your efficiency and effectiveness.

So there's me and one other person, Cecily. We are the strategic team, but we're in an office of performance and innovation, our little title where we have. We have six of us. So we also in this office do. Oh my gosh, look at. I just forget about the other side because I'm like, whatever. They're not strategic planning. They do process improvement. So those folks are over there. But we work very much as a team, so it's nice because they're always around to help. But we have 2,500 people in the city. We have well over 100 users in Clearpoint. When I first came in, we had like two. It was two people that manage it and everything was done in these spreadsheets. We have obviously, yeah, broken that right open. But yeah, we always have multiple people in departments that are in the system putting their data in, doing the work, looking at the information, which helps a lot. You know, we take care of training, we take care of any help that people need. Luckily, it's so user friendly. We don't, you know, get a ton of calls, believe it or not, with 100 plus users. But yeah, we just stay on top of the training.

Okay, and one more. How do you define a business plan versus a work plan? Kind of different in different places.

Yes, no, it totally is. We used to call them department strategic plans and it used driving crazy because then you'd ask for people to update the strategic plan and they were like, what strategic plan? So yeah, so say why strategic plan? So the department business plans are like miniature strategic plans for the department. So something that for three years, what are going to be your priorities and your focus? Things where a work plan is your fiscal year work plan. What do you hope to accomplish in the next 12 months or by the end of the fiscal year? That's all it is. It's really the work plan is like a subset, we would think in theory anyway of your business plan.

Gotcha. And then you were talking a little bit about how you're at the beginning of your new three year cycle. So how are you going to leverage clearpoint for that? Like how does that work?

Yeah, how does that work? So right now we're still in the brainstorming so post it notes on the board phase of it. But yeah, we build that all out in clearpoint. We want to do more of defining of our initiatives than we have in the past. We want to do certain things on how much anyway, there's a lot we want to do around our initiatives. We did not well define them in the past and so it got a little muddy when we started off. And so we hope to use clearpoint because it provides a template for people to just to go in, put their information what we need because fill out, you know, fill it out kind of thing. You can find out easily what's missing by different reporting. But yeah, so using clearpoint to really collect all of that data, better define things, the measures that are going to be related to those initiatives. It's really in my mind that's where we're really going to be using clearpoint quite a bit in this process is that initiative definition and all the information that needs to come around that which is so much easier than a bunch of yes. Documents all over the place.

Awesome. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a three minute break. I'm gonna show clearpoint in three minutes and then we'll wrap up with, with any other questions. But really, really appreciate you sharing, sharing your story at Durham. I think it is super valuable for those of you that have never seen clearpoint before. That's where I'm just gonna show this really quickly. Let me get back to our homepage. You know, imagine in your strategy reporting application you can put whatever you want, your list of goals or objectives, your measures, your projects, you can have all of these items linked together in an easy to see way and then all of your departments linked together as well. This is a very simple fake city called Metropolis. And if we were to look into Metropolis's financial information, we could see in our goal level, maybe a quick view of how we're doing with some of our measures. We could see how all of our departments are linked to this goal. We could attach PDF documents maybe coming from our budget department and then we link off to our critical measures and then you can drill down into any of those measures. That's where you see your pretty charts. Your charts are built off of data. The data here can be manually input, it can come from Excel CSV and it can integrate with other applications. So I know we also had a question that I didn't ask you more about, like how does clearpoint integrate with other applications? We have tools for loading data and some applications we link to directly. And we of course have an open API as well. And then if we were to drill down into any projects, this is where Sherry was talking about being able to see a Gantt chart for what you're doing with any particular project. You can also track data associated with your projects as well. But imagine a world where we wanted to see, you know, let's say in our initiatives, all of our initiatives together, you could see them in, in one big Gantt chart. We still use. Probably should have explained this. Red, yellow, green status indicators, green meaning on track, yellow meaning slightly off track. Red, you know, really needs help, maybe blue, we haven't started yet, things like that. It's all customizable based on the way that, that you report in your organization. We do have workflows to allow you. When Sherry talked about 100 people in the organization, you know, using Clearpoint, you can reach out to them with single blast saying now it's time for our reporting update. And Sherry can track whether people have made their updates or not, nudge them along with reporting, which is a little bit more efficient than running over to their desk or hoping they send you an Excel file that they haven't changed from percentage to whole number or something like that. All of this can be printed in briefing books and can be exported to public facing dashboards or even internal dashboards if you wanted to do them that way. And then clearpoint can be completely customizable. Some of the features that we're really excited about is anywhere you are in the tool. So for example, if we're over here on our revenue measure, the same place we were before We've added the ability to have chatting in here and you can, you can mention particular people like the owner here, Lance Cummins. You can mention him and say, lance, why is this variance dropping? When I post that, Lance will get a notification in the tool, in his email and in teams, and he could reply directly in teams or email and it would respond back here. So it is really meant to, to encourage that collaboration that Sherry was talking about and allow, you know, two people to kind of manage strategy across the whole city. So, so we're, you know, we're, as Sherry said, we've been working with them for, for more than 10 years. And during that time, a lot of the innovations that I just showed in clearpoint are coming from, you know, people like Sherry saying, you know, it'd be great, would really help me do my job better. And that's what we listen for and have a great customer success team to help out as well. So I know there are a few other questions that are coming in, but we're out of time and we really try to keep this right on time. So Sherry really do want to thank you for this. For those of you that ask questions, we will be responding to all of them offline and providing a, a copy of this recording. Shepard, anything. Did I just take your last lines?

That was perfect. Sherry, thank you a ton. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for joining us. And as Ted mentioned, we'll follow up. The idea was to give you an overview of how things are done at City of Durham and where it, where it really gets interesting often is when we can drill into your situation a little bit and tell you how organizations like Durham have done, have addressed similar issues. So with that, thank you everyone. Have a fantastic rest of your day.

Thanks again, Sherry.

Thank you.

All right, bye.