Performance Management with the City of Dublin, OH

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. For our customer interview webinar, we are joined by Brandon Brown, director of Performance analytics for the city of Dublin, who will be giving us an inside look at the city council's performance management process. Interviewing Brandon will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint Strategy's two founders. The audience will be muted for the duration of this webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions into the Q and A tab. Ted, I'll go ahead and pass things on to you.

Great. Thank you, Jenna. And thank you, Brandon. Thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about your role at Dublin and Dublin itself.

Sure. We're a suburb of the city of Columbus, Ohio, in the northwest corner. About 50,000 people, about 25 square miles were known locally and somewhat globally. We push out our reputation a lot. We're the home of a lot of businesses. We use economic development as a big driver for our community. We host a variety of really large events. Our Dublin Irish Festival is, is one of the biggest ones, I think, in the. In the United States. And actually next week we host the PGA Memorial Tournament. So we're known for some of those kind of things and some really weird public art. So if you search Dublin and corn, you'll find a field of corn with Osage orange trees. Public art installation. So I've been at the city of Dublin for about 20 years and I started off as our GIS coordinator and my role has shifted, changed, and melded in and out of technology over the last few years a lot with strategic planning, performance management from kind of a data and data analytics perspective. But my team also is charged with kind of the wrangling, all the innovation that happens here. And we have an internal group called piworks, which is process improvement, innovation and engagement. And so we have a lot of people trained in lean Six Sigma facilitation skills, design thinking, all these really cool ways to kind of eke out efficiencies all around. And that's where I think the melding of the technology and the performance and the strategic all come together.

Excellent. Well, I enjoy, I will enjoy hearing more about how innovation gets into your to your strategy. I think we first met in 2020. You had joined one of our strategy cohorts. Tell us what brought you to this area of focusing on performance management.

Sure. Around that same time, our GIS and data team was embedded within our more holistic technology team and it was peeled out to change some of the focus. We still partner with them quite a bit, actually. Right now I'm interim Director of IT and the director of my group. So it just shows you how intertwined those things are. But we were peeled out a little bit to be able to focus a little more on the strategic side of things and utilizing our data and our different analytics to really start telling the story internally and externally of how we were doing on various goals, various programs and initiatives, those types of things. So around that time, I was at a virtual conference and I met a friend from Arvada, Colorado, because they had a team of. They called it their ninja team. So it piqued my interest because I love ninjas, because I don't know why you wouldn't. But their ninja team was also black belt oriented. And so we. We made a connection and I reached out to them and as I talked to Kelly, who was the person at that time in Arbada, she mentioned this cohort. And it just also happened to be lining up with a directive from our city manager for us and for me to figure out ways with data to start showing and utilizing different performance measures.

Okay, excellent. And where y', all, you know, tell me about how you were reporting and getting started back at the time?

Sure. Maybe a year or two before that. The city manager at the time, he has history in the military, and he was actually the commander of the Ohio National Guard for a while. And they had a whole different types of series of performance measures and analytics that they would use. And he approached the senior leadership staff here with the question of, how are you winning? Is kind of where we started. Dublin is very planned and we have a lot of different strategic things going on. And one thing that was kind of interesting is we've kind of met in the middle of strategic planning and performance measures where we didn't have a full blown strategic plan. We had many different types of strategic plans. We used our community plan as a. As a proxy for a lot of that. So. So it was interesting for me to have this learning path to try to understand, you know, how are we winning? But I kept feeling like there's the missing question of what are we playing? And so he asked each of those directors, they would put together slides. Typically it was slides of the easiest to get data, because that's what you do. You wait till right before the meeting and you grab all your data, throw it on a PowerPoint. Hopefully you're using some, like, awesome wing dings and weird little symbols and everything, and you throw it up there on the screen and talk about it. So they were loosely based on stat meetings. And so the idea was just to continuously improve that and keep getting better.

It sounds like it might not have been all that consistent, but you could declare you were data driven.

Correct. And it hurt my team because, you know, the day before those meetings when everybody needed that data, they had to come to our team because they couldn't remember where they got it the last time. And, you know, so highly inefficient. And then also the things people were showing and talking about, a lot of them had made sense and some made no sense. You know, again, it was, why, why are we measuring this? What value does this give us? What behaviors do we change? I coined a term for myself that I kind of like made people annoyed with. And I said, how does it change your Tuesday? You know, if we know this or if we're watching this or monitoring this, what are you going to do different on Tuesday when you find out about this? And if, if nothing, then maybe we don't need to monitor it.

Imagine with clearpoint or any software, you would provide structure to a lot of this. But you talk about innovation in your, your strategy. So do people feel constrained to that? Like, was there a trade off or how did you keep allowing organizations to be innovative?

I think this was also used at that time as a catalyst for quote, unquote, innovation. Our city manager at that time had a, he would say, everyone's a cio, everyone's a chief Innovation Officer. And it's really true. We've, we've grown from a small village to what we are now with about 400 or so staff. I joined 20 years ago and we were like at 200. So the city's grown and our services have grown and we're known for super high level of service. And the other thing I like to say is that when you ask people for sometimes performance measures, tell me how you're winning. Well, I'm too busy winning to tell you how I'm winning. That's an argument you get into. And so the catalyst and the carrot for innovation was saying, hey, if we look at this systematically and actually with innovation lens, how could we automate? We like to try to automate ourselves out of jobs so we can do new jobs. And how can we make this easier, easier so that you're not scratching and clawing to try to find the data. And so as part of that, we approached it a lot like one of our process improvement projects where we really analyzed the measures people were providing, thought about them critically, found the data sources, and where we could, we created automated pathways. So that was something that was kind of the carrot on the other end of the stick saying, you're going to do this, let's try to make it easier and better.

Right, okay. And so how did you, how did you roll it out in the city?

Well, I think I'll share my screen now because this makes a lot of sense. And let me click three buttons.

And.

What we did was our council is part of our data driven decision making. Our city council adopted a series of measures that were called the council adopted performance measures. And they were things that they really cared about and really wanted to see. And what we did with that was, that was a process where we determined and we started showing council, hey, these are the measures that we utilize internally and we talk about at our meetings, at our update meetings. What of these pique your interest and do you care about. And so this was a really nice starting point. And they really care about our economic development engine, which includes our building standards and our community planning in our in finance. So we're funded by income tax here in Ohio. Cities are, you know, that's like over 90% of our funding. So. So that's the game that we're playing. And so they came up with a series of measures that they wanted to keep tabs on. So we worked with each of those divisions to hone in and really get their measures in a good state. And then we were able to build scorecard specifically for council. So we were able to give them a report for each of the different groups where they could really dive in and see what all the measures that they were wanting to track. And also they could go back to a macro level and they could see how those interplay with each other as well as looking at some of their strategic goals that they created. So chart candy, we've got lots and lots of charts and the things that people really like. And we're really excited with some of the new UI features here too, like doing some of the things with the, the little capture or sparklines, just like to go back to some of these front pages. And so again, as we tie things in, we start to look at their annual goals as well. And the power we really started to discover here and with clearpoint was the linkages using something as a base point of reference to get information flow started. Or we like to say it's the start of the rabbit hole. So you're interested in a quick overview and then you can guide yourself and find anything that you want from that aspect.

So do you find people who are kind of getting down in there and then the Questions you would get would be at a much deeper level because they've been able to drill down and find the things that drove their curiosity.

Yeah, and I think in some cases the hope was that that would eliminate questions. We have. A lot of organizations probably have this, but, you know, people want to jump to the lowest level of detail to start a conversation a lot of times when really the conversation belongs at a different scale. And so this accommodates that, you know, we can jump between those scales. We still are working on adoption of having, you know, people go in and self serve and do these things, but we start to see it more and more at meetings and someone mentioned something and say, well, I saw that in Clearpoint. That's really cool that at least that's a step. You know, it's not full blown with conversations and all those kind of things as well, but I think it helps. And when we can say, well, that data or that information is there, we can send you a link rather than say, go find it. That's also, you know, sometimes we're still, we're still in the service mode.

So, so we're thinking about rolling this out just to kind of get back to that, that part of the story is you built this, the high level measures for, for the city and the city council and then encouraged each department to, to link to those measures or like, how did it technically roll out? Like, were all the departments just clamoring to say, I would love to build something in a new technology and align my organization.

Really? TED yes, some of them were, Some of them were, you know, I called myself a, an eternal optimist with a heavy dose of realism. So, but, but someone once taught me, especially in the innovation space, is that you go after willing participants. And so we had four groups that were willing participants because they were told they had to be by council and we wanted to make their life easy. We started showing some of the capabilities to others. And I'll share my screen again real quick. And I think that this really helped us get more buy in and get people interested. So for instance, on this screen we're showing an aspect that they didn't totally grasp at the beginning. But this is very powerful and we think we're very kind of initiative or project based here with our capital improvement program. You know, think anything from street building to repaving to creating new community plan aspects or new zoning districts and those types of things. So when we started showing them the capability to be able to track what we call projects or they started calling initiatives that really got A few more people on board. And really, for instance, our engineering group, they've got a number of those types of reports where they go and they meet and they talk about where are we with each of these projects. So we have the budget aspect, which we utilize a different piece of software for that tracks the money and the spending or what was budgeted. But then we also utilize clearpoint to say here's the high level project status and here's the general burn down of the budget on some of those as well. And so that, that's really helped, I think, have other people come aboard. And we actually saw a great thing. Our Parks and Rec team were working on updating their Parks and Rec master plan. And they said, hey, could we use clearpoint to basically keep tabs on where we are? Like it's just a big overall. Gantt, their project team, their consultant was doing a little bit of that, but we wanted a way we could share that internally amongst the different groups. And so they, they used one of our management analysts and they built that out and they started using that. We see a few different use cases like that with different aspects, not just performance measures.

Great. It sounds like you could provide them something of value and then they immediately jumped onto it.

Yeah, I think that's. And that that drives us a lot. We use the term value quite a bit. It comes from our background training. Lean Six Sigma is that if you're going to do something because you're hoping that it has value, you know, try to do it the most efficient way that you can. And again, you know, organizationally you'll find pockets and cities are weird creatures because our old city manager used to say we had like 28 lines of business. You know, we're not a multinational conglomerate, but we are. You know, when you think about how different some of the activities that people are doing are, how can we get one common view of that and that this is where clearpoint has really started to play that role again, being a nice starting point and launching point to go off into those different aspects.

Great. And so tell me about some of the benefits that you've seen from using a common technology like clearpoint.

I think conversationally it's helped when in another big benefit is. And I guess conversationally what I'm talking about is that as people are talking about certain things, they have the same frame of reference now. So it's not the PowerPoint deck that I opened from an email that I found versus the one that you opened from the network drive that you found. And we have to spend the first 20 minutes arguing that the numbers are different, that, that we see immediate benefit. We can say, here's. This may not be the source of truth, but it's the one we've determined this we're going to use as a source. There's a source of truth. So, you know, just meaning that there's other internal systems that are all running around in the background of this. But I think some of the other benefits were, was that critical exercise of walking through. What do we do and what do we need to capture and what, what makes sense for us to. To tell our story of like how we're doing well and what. What we're actually doing. And this all comes into play as well. When you think in terms of things like Covid or emergency operations. You hear the term essential functions quite a bit. You know, so the essential functions, you can get really deep and detailed like when you think of a streets department or you can think at a higher level. And that's again, trying to find the correct scale for something like clearpoint, where it's. Where it's important not to kill somebody with, you know, all the minutiae and the little detail. But what do we do for this city and how are we doing at that? What are our canaries in the coal mine, so to speak? So that's been another real benefit of having those conversations and getting people to understand kind of the different scale differences. Sorry, it's that background in geography. I'm always going scale and perspective on everything.

Can you talk about the opportunities for coaching that clearpoint provided?

Okay, yeah, I think during the process. So I. We have three management analysts that are located in the office of the city manager and our operations group and our development group. And so I utilized them and that was actually really good timing because I was kind of teaching them the capabilities of the software and what it could do. They were all new to their roles, so it really helped them go out and understand more of the businesses that they were serving. And, and they worked in the end with the director. So the coaching would be, you know, as we saw people writing answers or next steps or describing their statistics or their measures, there was plenty of opportunity to work on what makes sense to write. Don't write a book, you know, write the highlights. What I did want to do is try to share my screen again. We'll see if this doesn't blow up the Internet. So let's go to that again. And so where we are today. And at the beginning I mentioned how we were kind of attacking this from two ends. We started with performance measures which made my mind not work great, because the cohort where I first met you, Ted, we started with the strategic frameworks where my mind was nice and at ease and I just couldn't get everything put together. It took a number of months and lots of, you know, therapy with my friends from the clearpoint community and others to help me get through some of this. But the good thing is, is progress has been made where we did work through with city council to come up with what we call our strategic framework. And what it is comprised of are these three areas. So we've got themes of sustainability, connected and resilient. And then we have four goal areas in each of those. And so what we've been working on doing is all that good work that we did, developing performance measures and identifying our different strategic initiatives, it comes back to the power of those linkages. So now we're able to build out our themes of sustainable and our goals of economic, fiscal, environment and services. And there's words behind all of these and if we dive into them, you know, that's we're utilizing clearpoint to store all that. And our next steps are to go onto a public site around that. But then we've gone through a number of exercises with the leadership staff to say, remember those performance measures you're doing, where do they fit in this framework? If something doesn't fit, do we still, is it still important to you to measure? So we again follow that critical path of what value are we getting with things we're actually measuring. So we're really excited to be able to take this structure and go to the public side of that. Some of those may have some measures that we show publicly. Some of them may just be pages full of links to other strategies and plans where you can go and find all that information. So this is again where we see some excitement and some really forward momentum with that.

Yeah, that's great. And we actually got a question in the chat while you were talking about this that said, is there a public facing dashboard or kind of, what are your plans for that?

Oh yeah, that's the plan. So we are working on. We've gone through our transition of the city manager at the end of the year, last year into this year, and we're still doing some organizational work and trying to figure out the best place for this. My direct Foster, former assistant city manager is retiring. So see, we're kind of constantly evolving and figuring out what's where and how is it going to get to where we want it, but the general direction is that, yeah, we will be working on pushing this out forward and then also looking at other ways to even insert other measures and metrics elsewhere, like within city properties. When we see that, we like to think of it as again, there's, there's different hubs of information and we have a pretty strong GIS program and so we're doing things like embedding maps, ArcGIS maps into the clearpoint measures. So if you're there, because so much of what we do has a physical component, so clearpoint may show the condition of our roadways overall and have some discussion, but then there's an ArcGIS map sitting there also showing you what years we're going to take care of those pavements. So integrating those back and forth between is what we really like to be able to do. And so we're excited about those steps coming up.

Yeah, that's great. And we've also seen the reverse. Right. And it's especially tricky in a situation like yours, but we've seen that situation play out amongst not only local governments but in other and other industries where there's a lot of turnover post Covid, whether it's from an election or retirement or whatnot. And you're like, what's our new approach?

Yeah.

So with Clearpoint we can embed Clearpoint charts into ArcGIS, if you chose to go that way, or ArcGIS into Clearpoint. So it's nice pointing out that you're not the only one that's like struggle with this but also seeing the value of saying we need both types of information in the same place.

Yeah, absolutely. I was just going to say that flexibility is really key. We have deeper data. Business and power. Bi or tableau, same thing. I draw triangles all the time because it's clearpoint, it's going to be like ArcGIS and something else. So we're constantly moving that and just getting information to people. Yeah.

So as you think about kind of the future of performance management in Dublin and the public facing dashboard and other items, would love to hear more about, you know, kind of what's on the to do list of opportunities. But we also got a second question, so I'm going to give you a two part question. You can dance around which parts you'd like to answer is during this transition that's going on in the, in the back end while you're still thinking, you know, of leaders, senior leadership, you know, kind of during this transition and how are you working on getting their buy in for pieces like that? So both like you have new leaders, you also have plans on what you're hoping to accomplish. How have you worked with those new leaders and either adjusted your plans or worked to get appropriate buy in.

In a couple of cases it's been nice because the other leaders do some of that work for us, you know, so as a new leader comes in they'll say where are we doing? Or where is this thing? And you hear someone else say, oh, that's in Clearpoint and this is how we do that here. And that's really refreshing and nice to hear from my perspective because that's adoption. That's you know, starting to be culture building. The other thing is we, we spend a lot of time discussing people's needs and again, value. How can this be valuable to you? How do we do this? And it's, it's not all roses here, you know, it's, it's the same thing. You're going to have leaders in areas and groups that don't feel like updating their measures or they don't do these things. And, and so you do need some top level leadership for that. We're really trying to get council a bit more invested on utilizing the system themselves because you hear tales of like, well, we're doing council and I heard they never look at it, you know, and, and I don't give those statistics, I don't know where people are finding them, you know, but, but that always does help. But then I think it's important to examine why do people feel like that? Why, you know, or why doesn't council do that? And then, you know, on the, on the forward looking side of things again, I think the main thing is, and this is really where the buy in comes in even more is that that public facing side of things. And as we talk more and more about a strategic framework, this is the way that we'll prove it out. And so it's kind of a self virtuous cycle.

Okay, awesome. We have time for. I'm going to try to squeeze in two more questions.

Okay, I'll answer quick.

Did you start to build the performance management maturity levels from departments first or initiate discussions from the top management? This is kind of two questions came in at the same time and I think they're related. One was, one was that it's like where did you start to build those performance management second? One very, very similar was the framework built from the bottom up, like looking at all the performance measures and initiatives and then how to group them together or kind of from the top down? And how to get everyone to align.

So we started the main thrust of this from the measures. So again, that started with the city manager's edict of tell me how you're winning. And that was done more internally in the internal vacuum without, you know, not with council and others. And so that, that had some comings and goings of getting started, but this was the real effort when we said, okay, we're, we're actually going to do this. You guys all have a good start. Let's make it better. So that was really with each of the different departments and divisions and we've gone round and round as far as.

I hope I didn't crash again.

You're still there, I think, but, but you know, there is some back and forth where sometimes you do need a leader to say what they do want to see. So that was some coaching we had to do. On both sides, the strategic framework came about through a different effort from council, who's one of their typical. They do goals for every couple of years. And one goal was to develop a strategic framework for 2035. So that was a whole series of different facilitated sessions where they tried to bubble up what, what it is that, you know, we do here and what we feel and believe. And so again, that's why and where we have this wonderful opportunity now to mesh from both sides, because now we do have that higher end and the bigger structure of the strategic framework, plus the work that's already been done. And we'll have to note we'll have to develop new measures in some cases, you know, based on some things that council came up with in the strategic framework that aren't accounted for.

The rest I know we ran over. I appreciate you very much for being here. Clearly the problem was on our side and I greatly apologize for that. And on behalf of everyone that attended, I do want to thank you so much for your presentation.