State of the Art Strategy Reporting with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

Good morning, everyone. My name is Shepard Smith, part of the marketing team here at clearpoint. I'd like to thank you for joining us to discuss some of our favorite topics and anticipate yours as well. Strategy, Reporting, and Performance Management. This webinar is set up in a manner I'm sure is familiar to everyone. The audience is muted, but we encourage questions and comments and ask you to please submit them at any point in the questions tab. We have two speakers today. Brandy Holloway is director of Strategy leaders, Legal compliance and Reporting at the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, where she leads an 18 person strategy management team. Interviewing Brandy 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. Ted, I'll turn the presentation over to you.

Okay, thank you. Shepard and Brandy, welcome. I'm excited to be chatting with you today. Why don't we start by. By just telling us a little bit more about who the Choctaw Nation is.

Of course. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here talking with you today, Ted. Choctaw Nation is federally recognized tribal entity. We are in southeastern Oklahoma, and our reservation is comprised of about 10 and a half counties is our area. The tribe has a main business focus and is comprised of seven main divisions. Those divisions consist of a little over 12,000 associates across our reservation. It's quite a large entity. It's a wonderful, wonderful place to work. And these divisions all have multiple departments that vary so differently in businesses. We have commerce, strategic development, tribal services, integrated services, finance, communications, and legal and compliance. So our department of Strategy is actually headed by my senior director. Her name is Lindsey Caballo, and she has kind of been the flagship of what this department has become and what it looks like today. So Choctaw is very known for tribal casino gaming, but also, for example, our tribal services consist of health member services such as housing, education, outreach services, cultural services. So just a very vast and very diverse organization.

Yeah, it sounds like businesses and whole hospitals as well as local governments. Yes, have it all. So tell me a little bit about how you thought about strategic planning kind of prior to 2018. Like, what was it like when you arrived?

Sure. So our current Office of Strategy was formed in about 2019. Prior to that, the tribe was using a specific strategy methodology that was very, very granular in nature and very specific according to which department or division might have been utilizing it. After a little trial and error and a lot of lessons learned, my director Lindsay was basically the flagship of our first strategy Director, if you will. For the tribe, things were very bottom up, not so much aligned as what they've become now. And she was the first one to really jump in and start managing and updating and keeping track of, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of projects in her area that she supported. But across the tribe, it was, you know, definitely a couple thousand. An organization this big, it's, there's so much happening. So she was directly involved and the leadership saw what value there is in having, having that key management process, strategy, management resources in the organization. And it really just grew and formed from there.

So when you think about several thousand projects kind of being put in everywhere, like how was that managed? Is it one giant Excel file or handwritten or what did it look like?

A little bit of everything. At one point it tried to stay universally located. So, you know, there was a keeper of the binder. But it's, it's so difficult to keep everybody aligned and focused when there are that many things happening across probably a little over 10,000 at that time.

So when you're, when your group gets formed and you say, well, let's kind of wrestle these to, to the ground, so to speak, like, how do you, where do you start? Like, how do you begin to take several thousand projects and make sense of it?

You start with a lot of patience and a lot of open mindedness of what lessons you're about to learn. For us, we started deploying strategic planning across the tribe in 2019 when the Department was formed. And it was done across divisional and departmental levels. After, like I said, a lot of, a lot of organizational growth and a lot of lessons learned. It has shifted from those specific individualized strategic plans into one tribal strategic plan. And that's comprised of five tribal strategies. And that is what, what keeps our organization aligned and focused for common goals, common resources, you know, one tribe, one focus. And it's, it's come so far and it's in such a good place with, with how it's working right now, everyone.

Jump on board with these five strategies. Like did it, you know, just easily roll out or.

It was so smooth. No, as you can imagine, it's, it's a lot to take in, especially when you're dealing with several different levels, like hierarchical levels of management and associates. So whenever a tribe's strategic plan rolls out and gets pushed down sometimes, once it makes it to the frontline associate level, then where the mass of associates lie, it's really hard to get that buy in. Something that we did over this past summer is deploy A marketing campaign, an internal marketing campaign for all of our associates. And we did a leadership toolkit awareness, how to talk about it, why it's important, how what you're doing every single day contributes to it, and just making sure that everyone understands how important the strategic plan is and how much that they contribute to the success of it as well.

That's great. It sounds like the old adage of communicate seven times seven ways, as y' all were just, you know, all in on trying to make that happen.

Definitely.

So. So no surprise you're using clearpoint. Why don't you explain a little bit? Just kind of at the high level. What does your kind of clearpoint usage look like?

Sure. Clearpoint really changed the way that we look at our own organization of the strategic plans initiative. So we have a few scorecards. Our main scorecard is where 100% of the strategic plan in itself lies. We have a couple of supplemental scorecards for our legislative agenda in partnership with our government relations teams. We use some for monitoring items that, you know, when you've marked something complete, but maybe we still need to make sure that some later information comes out on it. We've really taken advantage of multiple functionalities of what clearpoint is capable for to customize how it's going to make us more successful. So in our main scorecard, our clear point is organized by the five tribal strategies at our category level. And then from there we go down into our focus areas and our strategic objectives. So I know a lot of accounts have different names for what they call, you know, all levels of their strategic planning or projects. But for us, the strategic objectives are where the bulk of our work is done. Everything else is alignment and justification purposes, if you will. So in our strategic objective level of the system is where a lot of project management capabilities are. And so currently we have around 200 strategic objectives. And that sounds crazy, but remember, this is across hundreds of businesses, programs and services in our organization. So we are organized in our system with some standardization processes across our team. So we widely function on the tagging capability of the system. So we have very specific tags for very specific departments. And our supplemental reporting is just comprised of filtering to catch what we need to catch. And that allows us to have 60 to 70 current monthly individualized reports that go out to very specific leads. And it allows them to see what they need to know, see what might be helpful to know, but also only see the things that bring value to them. It would be unrealistic to ask somebody to, you know, read updates for the entire strategic plan every single month. So by the tagging capabilities, some custom field capabilities, and, you know, generating our briefing books to pull in those very specific reports, we're able to even utilize, putting on specific covers for the briefing book. So it's a very personal strategic reporting experience for our leadership.

Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go back through some of the things that you said, because for this webinar, we're just trying to have it be a conversation so we're not sharing a bunch of graphics to get people confused while we talk. But what I heard you say was you used to have several thousand projects that you were trying to track, and now you have, I think you said like 200 or something like that. So did you just throw away the other 1800 or the other 2000 or how did we. Tell me about this. Is it a prioritization process? Like, how did you get that number down?

Sure. So back when our original strategic planning deployed, it was a wide up approach. I don't necessarily want to call it a bottom up approach, but it was a wide departmental and up approach. After having multiple versions of department focuses. By having a centralized office of strategy, there's so much internal communication that happens. You know, weekly roundtable meetings and, you know, walk down to someone's office for information. Even. So, by having this close department, you're seeing commonalities, which is a great thing in an organization, but you're seeing commonalities across different departmental strategic planning processes and outcomes from those cleaning sessions that we started realigning and finding natural efficiencies. And it was a very long and tedious process, but it really allowed us to see the inner workings of departments that a lot of people, if you're not in that department, wouldn't get to see and experience. So by seeing, you know, RFPs that are happening for very specific needs, other departments are now able to see the transparency of what's on the entire strategic plan and understand, like, where they can be a part of things at. You know, we don't have to start a separate process. This is already happening over here. We can utilize that for you as well. And that really just is an example of how the efficiencies really snowball by being able to produce information and transparency and value in our monthly reports.

Yeah, so, okay, so it sounds like you consolidated a lot of the. The initiatives that were project or what you call objectives from kind of everywhere down to core group. You track a lot of information with attachments and using custom fields. Then you use both tagging and custom fields to create individualized reports for each of your major departments. Did you say like 60 or 70 different departments?

Yes. So by having specific tags identified in our system, for example, the division of Commerce may have five or six major departments in it. So there was some trial and error and some thought behind the tagging at the major department level. That way you can aggregate up. But remember, when you're filtering information, it's really hard to aggregate down if you don't have it separate or notated or just those customizations happening in your system. It makes it really hard to get that personalization for being able to see what you want to see.

And so if a department receives, let's say they receive of the 200, is it like five or seven or something like that? Do they know which ones they're responsible for or which. Like I'm thinking of a, a RACI matrix. I don't know if you use something like that.

That's exactly what we use. We use an extended RACI matrix. So the RASCI within our department we've standardized what each of those mean. And our, our accountable field is really our owner. This is the responsibles or the doers. So the people who may be doing the work on your projects. But going back to that accountable. Our monthly reports consist of the objective, the accountable percentage complete. Some request an overall start and end date. Some don't like their reports that cluttered and then what the system would notate as analysis and recommendations for us that has different verbiage on again the wonderful customizations for how you want your organization to see things. Just those six or seven fields are all that get pulled in. And then of course the filter catches which pieces of information go in that report. But the tags are kind of a background functionality. So when something goes out we have a few specialized alignment matrix reports to see. You know, all of these departments that are tagged. But the tagging is not synonymous with ownership for us it is a. Who needs to know this? Who wants to know this? Do you want this on your monthly report or not? And it is, it seems so simple in nature, but it is game changing. By making sure that you start the ownership and the taggings at the appropriate level, then you can, you can really do a lot with your reporting customization.

Oh, it sounds amazing that you can have, you know, 12,000 person organization spanning so many different types of businesses all in a single scorecard. So filtering is quite amazing. So then you said you send out these personalized individualized reports once a month. Can you describe kind of what that monthly cadence looks like. Like is it just a, a report goes flying out and no one sees it or talks about it? Like, how does your department get involved?

So we've been doing our current meeting cadence for I want to say around 10 months, give or take a month or two. So we work off just a one month basis. So we'll back in for November updates that are going out. So for the month of November, our senior managers across the team have spent all month and our deadline for their required updates on their assigned strategic objectives in Clearpoint. They always have until the third of the next month. So for November it was December 3rd. After that deadline kind of passes, we have an internal on our strategy reporting team and she goes through line by line and the strategic plan and not to edit content but to refine, refine and standardize and make sure that everything sounds like it's coming from one voice when it comes out by reading an update, you should not know who put that in is kind of our goal for that. So our person on our strategy reporting team who works from the cutoff on the third goes through that process, gets back with the team for questions and clarification. And our goal is that we always have our monthly reports distributed via email currently by or before the 15th of every month. So after the team's third of the month deadline passes, they spend, you know, the next month starting over, we do it again. So they're having their stakeholder meetings, their project meetings and most importantly, we have a touch point with every single one of our leads across the tribe every month and if not every month, at least every quarter for people who may not have immediate real estate, if you will, on the strategic plan. So at that monthly check in, it's a time to get their updates, you know that they're responsible for putting in clearpoint. So it's a time to get their updates and also talk about any questions or feedback that they had on updates that came out from other projects on their report or hey, I noticed that there is several new sos on our overall alignment matrix. Can we get those added to our report moving forward? So it's a, it's a one on one time to make sure that everything is smooth and everything is correct and covered for the most part.

That was what I was going to ask. How does someone who's like receiving a report, it sounds like they're working with someone on the strategy team to make sure the report's up to date, but also for things that they're deeper into the race Matrix just getting their questions answered. Is that typically with your team like your team is or the strategy team, are the, the true experts kind of across the organization or do they ultimately, are there kind of cross departmental collaborations going on? Yeah.

So our department of Strategy, Office of Strategy is made up of about 18 people and there are four directors. So me and then three other directors on our department and our seven divisions are thoughtfully organized within those four little mini departments of strategy. So the people who work on our team were very knowledgeable in the areas that they support. You may not be the expert in the field, but you know, our team that works on and supports health has a wide variety of different backgrounds in and outside of the realm of health. So it's designed to where you understand the nature of the business, you are able to speak the jargon and understand how to fill in the blanks on an update that you may have questions on. So you're, you're there to support them and in turn it makes them feel better about who's supporting them, but also you're able to jump in and help. So we keep a strategic projects scorecard and that could be anything from developing a marketing plan or developing a business plan or an operational plan for someone helping work on organization restructures. So you're knowledgeable enough to be a valuable resource for your leads. And the strategic projects are kind of just baby objectives, if you will. They just having grown up quite enough to be moved over to our strategic plan scorecard. But it's a huge relationship building process. You know, we didn't get anywhere before we started forging those relationships with our leads across the tribe.

Awesome. What benefits have you seen from leveraging clearpoint, from using your team? You know, this whole monthly cadence that you talked about.

You know, an organization of any size, big, medium, small, they cannot possibly know exactly what every individual team is working on or what their focus is or what's important. So by having this system to keep all of our information. I know transparency is a huge, huge buzzword in the, in the strategy and reporting space, but it's just so true that the transparency just keeps letting those doors open. It keeps you finding operational efficiencies, it keeps other departments involved with the nice to know, not only the need to know, so it's brought a closeness and a focus that it's not that it wasn't previously there, but it's just the transparency. It's, it's just understanding the inner workings, the out of workings, everything that's happening that affects you indirectly. Even and you're able to use every piece of information to make the best decisions for your business.

Anything that you ever point to and say, hey, we accomplished this, or we found this particular savings, you know, financial savings or something like that in the organization.

Yes, there's some specific projects that were happening in areas. Other areas were kind of in RFPs for the same type of resource that the initial one was looking for. And by having a strategy team who's working with leads in those several separate departments, you know, at our weekly roundtables, we're able to say, like, hey, I'm working on that. I'm working on that too. So, you know, just the combination of efforts and having a centralized office of strategy to perform that strategy management, to be honest, it opened up light bulbs of this can be combined. These projects are one in the same. Or something's being utilized over here and it would benefit this other major department as well. So there are several that come to my mind, but overall, it just keeps happening over and over. Where you find, you find gems and efficiencies that change, change mindsets of, of your leadership that you're working with. And several of them are, you know, millions of dollars of savings. But it's follow through for us. It's. It's follow through and upkeep is what makes that difference and allows us to keep finding those efficiencies.

It must be great when you find one where you're like, we saved a million dollars across here.

The cool thing about it is we live in the background. So to help forge that relationship, it's always, look what this lead did or look what this department did. You know, you're here for them. So we also are very mindful about background stewards and understanding the value of what you're providing to others.

Yeah, I hear the modesty. Your departments are saving the money and you're just the facilitator. Yes, Got it. Is there any place. Just looking at one of the questions that came in, any place on your website or publicly available where you share anything about your strategy or like the five major strategies or, or things like that, or is it all kind of internal?

It's mostly internal, but we do provide community newsletters that are mailed out from chief's office tribal members, and also our main Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma website, there is a news and journals and archives section. And just by typing in, you know, strategic plan, tribal strategies, you should be able to find our. Our beautiful purple graphics. Part of our marketing campaign was we put our five tribal strategies in the focus areas everywhere. Every associate has a little badge edition that went across all 12,000 plus associates in the tribe. So it's awareness internally and we are beginning to make it more of a community focus right now. So it's not that that's a phase two, it's just we're still in that phase.

Got you. Before we run out of time, what's coming next in thinking about strategy management.

At clearpoint, my immediate goal that I would love to accomplish in the coming new year is automating the second half of our monthly distribution process, taking advantage of briefing books, being able to deploy those for us, and HTML briefing capabilities where it's not always just a PDF. And in the new year our strategy refresh sessions, if you will, before budgets open are about to kick off. So just continuing to refine the way that we utilize the functionalities and the customizations of our system. There's always ways to make it better and keep improving it. So that's just part of my main focus in my everyday is making sure that we are doing the most that we can with our awesome system.

Great Brandy, thank you so much for your time today. For those of you that are that are listening or anyone that wasn't able to make it, any of your colleagues, we are recording this. We will post it on our website as well. But Brandy, again thank you very much and best wishes for your automations coming forward in the new year.

Thank you so much. It was great to be here.

Bye everybody.