Strategic Alignment at Scale: How JEA is Powering Enterprise Success

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for our customer interview webinar. Today we are welcoming Kendra Cash, Enterprise Strategy Specialist for jea, where she leads efforts in driving strategic alignment across their organization. Interviewing Kendra 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 without further delay. I'll go ahead and pass things to you, Ted.

Thanks, Jenna, and thank you, Kendra, for joining us. Please tell me a little bit more about you and jea.

Oh, thank you for that question, Ted, and good morning. So my name is Kendra Cash. I'm a native of Jacksonville and I work at jea, one of the largest electric and water and sewer utility in Florida. And, and it primarily deals with Jacksonville and any surrounding areas. So we do handle Nassau, Clay, Duval and Putnam counties. So we have a big population of mass in which we serve internally. We have eight chiefs. So when you think about eight chiefs, we have 2,200 employee base. So our organization is extremely big for utility. And I've been with JEA going on nine years. So I was with JEA in Hurricane Matthew and then also Hurricane Irma. So as we are in transitioning and becoming a better utility space, we wanted to have something dealing with strategy. So we came upon, after reviewing all of the different applicants in regards to where we want to house our strategy, we came and we decided on clearpoint. And I was on that team and that deciding factor for clearpoint.

Awesome. So what were you doing before clearpoint?

Ted? I don't even want to talk about it. But we were Excel heavy. All of our information was housed in Excel. So as I mentioned, we have eight chiefs. So we have our technology group, they had Excel spreadsheets, we, we had our customer group, they had Excel spreadsheets. And then you had some of the field folks, they were dealing with metadata and they would house those in Excel sheets. So all of our information across the organization was housed in Microsoft Excel. We had a lot of silos there, which made it difficult for us to collaborate and work together. So as we transition into Microsoft 365, we became more ingrained in becoming more automated. So we shifted over to Power bi. And so rather having that information in the data warehouse where those would translate to Excel worksheets, we had those same data sources housed and configurated into data repositories in Power BI because we wanted more integration and collaboration. We thought that was step one and in getting that done.

Yeah, that's great. I think we see a lot of people that have so many Excel spreadsheets, and then they struggle with the idea of, let's say, using some of your departments. Like the field group has a certain number for number of customers, but then the technology group has a different number for number of customers. And your customer groups have a more precise or just a different definition for customers. And then you try to start looking at your cost per customer or your services per customer, and you start getting into some really confusing conversations. So I bet moving to Power BI really at least gave you that common denominator for some of your data.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We spoke the same language. Yeah, we began to speak the same language.

Yeah. So I want to think about, like, how your strat, what your strategy looks like today, and then we'll dig into, because I'm sure some people are probably wondering, right now we're talking about Power bi, but then we're talking about clearpoint. So I want to get to that. But can you share a little bit about what your strategy looks like today, how y' all kind of communicated in house, Maybe, you know, share some of your. Your strategic structure even?

Absolutely. Can I share my screen at this time to give you more clarity? All right, so I'm going to share my screen, and we are going to delve into clearpoint. Okay. So initially, our strategy is built on strategic objectives, focus areas, and. And initiatives. So as we were working on our strategy and we agreed upon clearpoint, we wanted to house all that information in clearpoint. So in our welcome page, we have jea. We have our values, which are integrity, respect, and safety. We have our strategic focus areas. Now, I want to stop right here because this is truly the driver of our strategy. Although the objectives and different initiatives change, those three focus areas will always remain the same. And those are developing an unbeatable team, delivering business excellence, earning customer loyalty. They will always stay the same. Those are initially the driver of our strategy. We have some strategic pillars here, which are they can fluctuate at times, but here is our strategy to answer that question. Ted, this is the strategy that we came upon, and this is old, as we all know strategy. We always review those every three to five years. So we're in the process of upgrading our strategy for the upcoming fiscal year of 26 and beyond. But as we look at 24 and as we're working in 25, this is what we have. So we have, if you look at the left side, we have those values in which I alluded to earlier, and then you have those focus areas that I mentioned to earlier. Those are the foundation and really the base of our strategy. Here at jea, we also do more so of a top down approach. So as I mentioned, we have eight chiefs. So once those chiefs come into consensus, then they kind of trickle down using that cascading model. And that's really how we have that methodology for our strategy. And on the right side you will see those strategic objectives, which are a lot. We have about 17 at the time.

So do the chiefs work on the strategic objectives and or do they suggest them in the beginning or they're just responsible for executing them? Trying to think about this, this top down approach.

So with the top down approach, the chiefs are the decision makers. So they agree upon what is the vision, what is the mission that we want to focus on in these next three to five years. So once they agree on these specific strategic objectives, then their directors and VPs are really the drivers. And then you have the managers and their teams are the executors of those chief level agreed upon strategic objectives.

Okay, cool.

All right. And then so we have a map here and then we also have never go to the map. Clearpoint did a great job of kind of highlighting the map. So as you can see some of these status indicators here, but let me trickle down and go to some of the elements so you can actually see the structure of our strategy. So as I mentioned before, we have those strategic objectives and those focus areas. And in those focus areas being the driver, what we did in order to structure it, we categorized those strategic objectives under those focus areas. So when it comes to reporting, there is a streamline and there is the order in which each chief can kind of relate on based on their strategic objectives and how it relates to their focus areas. Then you have the strategic objectives, the initiatives, the metrics, and then the tasks. So when it talks about having that proposed top down approach, the focus areas of course is that organizational driver for the strategy. The strategic objectives is that high level, chief level. But then when it comes to the initiatives, that's where the collaboration comes in within the organization. So you have your VPs, your directors, your managers, and they working together as a team to, to get some of those things done. And of course you have KPIs or metrics that really tailor to those particular strategic objectives.

Okay, and show me more.

Yeah, okay. I also want to show you this because this is also what I like about clearpoint is this tree right here. So as you can see we have the JA here and the JA strategy If you go down, you get to see how everything aligns. So it's a really cool feature that you all offer. And just another thought before you get to your next question. We also have, as far as the structure and housing, some of those metrics we have the Corporate Scorecard. And the Corporate Scorecard are those high level metrics that are at the enterprise level. And since it's in Power bi, clearpoint has the capability to truly visualize that information.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask is like you been talking about Power bi, so there's a lot. So the corporate Data is in PowerBI and you have it embedded into Clearpoint. So, so how do you differentiate kind of what's in PowerBI and what's in Clearpoint? And does that get confusing to, to your users or your, your chiefs? Like how, how does, how do these things work together?

Great question, Ted. And no, it doesn't get confusing. Clearpoint is what we want to have as that centralized place for strategy. So although there are influx of metrics across the organization, when it's dealing with the strategic objectives and really highlighting measures that show progress and status on those particular strategic objectives, we place those in clearpoint. Now when your day to day operational metrics, those are housed in our internal sites that we have here at jea. So that is truly the distinction between the two. And it doesn't get confusing. And we also have examples, as we also have some of the business units here of embedding Power BI dashboards just as an overview of that department. But like I said, the distinction is clearpoint is the strategy hub in which we use solely for strategy to highlight strategy collaboration amongst the organization to eliminate some of those silos that we previously had.

So you have this capability of seeing these measures that might even be updated in real time kind of in Power bi. Then you have some additional measures, but also all of your initiatives and the link to the goals which you can't really do as well in like a Power BI solely.

Right.

Okay, very cool. So, so how do you review this information? I think you had, you had told me earlier, you do like, oh, this is one of your exports.

Yes, this is one of our exports. So I kind of showed you gave you a quick demo of how we structured our strategy within clearpoint. Going from the focus area, strategic objectives, the initiatives, the metrics, and some of the tasks and milestones. So that's the structure in which we created the strategy. In that structure we can create and develop reports within clearpoint. And so what we did Is and I'll walk through this report each quarter. We want to provide status updates, progress on those particular objectives and initiatives, so we can create a cadence in which there is a quarterly report and we can identify those users in clearpoint and it'll automatically feed us reports for that quarter. And so the top page is of course the content page, table of contents right here. Because going to that point that you mentioned about metrics, clearpoint has the capability of creating not only quantitative metrics, but qualitative metrics. And because we're solely focusing on strategy, we wanted to capture what is based on status. How are we doing performance wise on those particular strategic objectives. So we actually created metrics that highlight our performance on those strategic objectives and then back based on the completion of those total objectives, how many are active. So we created metrics and put it in a pie chart for visualization purposes. And this gives the chiefs and other leaders visibility of how we're doing in regards to our progress on the objectives. And of course we wanted to bring in that vision at the time. And this is an archive report, but I just wanted to show you this is what a quarterly report will look like.

Right where you got a lot of green.

We made a lot of progress. And then when you see that blue icon, because things have changed, so things take priority. And then some things are no longer relevant to the organization based on the direction in which we're going. So that's why you see a lot of green made progress, but then you'll see some blue kind of sprinkled in the mist, no longer pertaining. I want to focus on this because it goes back to that alignment and I think this is key because those focus areas are our driver. We have those focus areas there and you'll see how, as I mentioned, in the structure, they align. And then we also have tags and the importance about tags, especially in clearpoint, if you tag something as far as initiative, you can or objective, you can bring that into a report. So even if we wanted to segment just earning customer loyalty, we can do a separate report there. But for quarterly business reports, we want to highlight everything all in one. And it can get granular and then we can keep the high level as well. So this is a comprehensive report. But ideally you'll have all of those strategic objectives and then the initiatives, the strategic steps, when we change that name. But those are essentially the milestones in any metrics. And we did that for all of the strategic objectives. And that will be the quarterly report and what it consists of. The last thing that I want to mention is this. And this is similar to how we capture the strategic objectives, but it's based on those focus areas. And once we have those focus areas, we can show progress on it. It's a metric that we created just to highlight our progression on those. And that, that is really it in regards to our quarterly business reviews.

Okay, awesome. We got a few questions from the audience. One was about Power bi. It's from David says, how are you embedding kind of the Power BI Dashboard into clearpoint? Is it an integration, is it kind of static or does it automatically update? Just tell us a little bit more about how that works.

Absolutely. So clearpoint is a great resource in having tutorials and then the success team is great as well. But there's an article. If you have a Power BI dashboard already created, you can just embed the link and you can create a data field within clearpoint of a Power BI dashboard, which is really a data field. I think it's either the HTTP or the C in which you can embed that link into that space and then your visualization will pop up. That's how you incorporate it in there.

Yep. And, and for David, it's live. So it's their Power BI live. So if something changes tomorrow, then when you load it, you'll see the live data in it. Okay, so next question for you from, from the audience was from Tom. I saw task in your strategy, like there were several hundred tasks. What kind of task are you tracking in clearpoint?

So those tasks, as I mentioned before, we have a big workforce space. So some of those tasks are manager driven. So based on the manager request, they work with their team and kind of designate and delegate those tasks accordingly. So those could vary based on the manager and director's needs. So that's why we have so many, because we had 17 objectives at the time. And so that workload will require require different number of tasks.

So all the different kind of managers and directors in the organization that are contributing anything are going to be putting their task in there so they can then track them. And you could say, here are the 20 to 40 things that we're working on to help achieve this objective.

Correct? That's correct.

Awesome. So, so one more question and I'm gonna, Julie asks this, says, can you share more about the scorecard tree and how you, how you, you get value from it? Because there are a lot of different kinds of trees in clearpoint. But I'll let you ask about, I'll let you answer about the scorecard tree and I'll. I might chime in a little myself with some other trees.

Because JEA is focused on cascading and alignment, we always want to show those connections. And because I alluded to earlier how we do the top down approach, you can see from that level, the top level, how it trickles down to that, even that, that task level in which David was asking about. So that's truly the benefit of having those trees just visually appealing. And I know there's different type of learners there. So actually seeing that tree, it makes that alignment pop more. So that, that will be the benefit that I would say is the most showing that, that alignment in that as well as the collaboration within the organization.

Yeah. And I know you showed kind of the, the department level tree even inside of Clearpoint. You can go from a department to show all of the elements underneath it and you can dig within an element and see the task, for example. So viewing it in a tree format versus a table format and I think you, you probably said it the best way is like there are definitely different people that like that learn in different ways. I found that showing like a table in clearpoint, some people get really excited about it and other people eyes just glaze over and then you show like a chart and they get all excited about it and the people that love the table, their kind of eyes glaze over. So it's, it's different. People really appreciate learning in different ways.

Absolutely.

So really quick before we leave, the quarterly reviews, you showed one of the kind of review documents, like how do.

You.

Like, are you running a review at the corporate level? Is each chief running their own review? Like how does the strategy cadence or the strategy dance kind of work? Are you, are you running eight reviews and then a corporate review or how do you get people involved in strategy?

So that's a two part answer and question. So from the corporate level, we are doing those quarterly business reviews, those are more high level, just giving you the facts, more charts. Less to your point Ted, less tables is more of those pie charts and graphs and figures because they really want to know, okay, what's the progress at that chief level, at that VP and that level. Now when it comes to working within the management sphere in their teams, those are more frequently like monthly and then you can always make weekly reports based on the task that's being completed. But to answer the question in regards to the corporate, those are a one time thing in which we have a recurrence because there's a schedule on there and we have the recipients that they go to and that's how we set it up.

Excellent. So, so how do you think clearpoint is, is working for you now and what do you think are some of the the tangible results?

Clearpoint is great. Better alignment for sure. Better collaboration. I didn't delve into it when I was sharing my screen, but because there's a field where we have people and is collaborators. In the past there were so many silos as I alluded to. But having that collaboration where you can see, oh, technology is working on something with customer and HR has an involvement piece in that strategic objective oil that is really the nutshell. And the beauty of clearpoint is better alignment, centralized location. You don't have one spreadsheet, that spreadsheet, but it's all in one place, that's another also a benefit. And then the reporting aspect, as we just mentioned, you can't beat it, especially when it's automated and you can kind of have those reporting flows. So just the alignment, the cascading and the collaboration and reporting alone is a true benefit of clearpoint.

Okay, great. I did get a question from Walter related to this, which is I'll just read it word for word. Based on your experience, Kendra, what do you think needs to be incorporated in the software to make it even better? And you can answer honestly.

Well, the next steps is the integration piece. I know I haven't tapped into everything that clearpoint offers, but I know AI is a big thing that is not going anywhere. So we can highlight more AI features and data integration. You know, as AI continues to enhance and improve. I think that will, that will bring clearpoint top tier above what it is currently.

Yeah, I will also, since you and I talked ahead of time, I'll also say I'll give an answer that you, that you and I were talking about a few weeks ago, which is the way our printing engine works for PDFs is the engine itself doesn't have permission to your power bi. So it's, it's, it's easy and awesome and you, you demonstrated it great. It's really easy to show how that can be reviewed live and y' all do a lot of live reviews, so that's great. And one of the things that, that we're partnering with you to try to figure out is like, okay, well how do we make it so we can screen capture those so that they do print? Because I know that you've been doing some, some simple screen captures for like the bigger reviews.

Absolutely.

Nice. If we could, if we could figure that in, you know, as we Go forward. And then just to respond to your AI work, we are kind of exactly running in that direction as well. So we already have the, the AI just analysis of data. Helping to summarize, you know, let's say those chief scorecards like their, their monthly reports. And then we're looking to do even more to be able to say, well, based on, you know, the longer you use clearpoint, so based on your history of information, we should be able to kind of predict, you know, where you're going as well because we can see that that additional data. Okay, so another question came in and then I have one more that I want to, is still in my list. So there's another one from, from David. It said is, is clearpoint itself being used to deliver these corporate and business review information to management, the board of directors, or do you export from clearpoint and kind of do a report out of it? Like how does that, how does that real report work?

Yeah, great question, David. So the real report we get the export. But of course there are some things that clearpoint, some of those other talking points that clearpoint doesn't offer. So clearpoint is a big driver in our presentation, but we do come together as an enterprise strategy team and kind of package that up. But the clearpoint report is a big part of it.

Awesome. So what are your next steps with clearpoint and next steps? Just in thinking about managing strategy at jea.

Great question, Ted. So the next steps for jea, as I mentioned when I first started the interview, was we are revisiting our strategy. So once we get that strategy finalized, then we'll kind of go back to the drawing board and put those new objectives in Clearpoint and get more collaboration there. Currently we are a four person team at the moment, kind of handling that 2,200 workload base within the organization. So getting that change management piece out and really and truly disseminating that information, have more users be involved in clearpoint, that those are our initial next steps. And then like I mentioned before, data integration, working with our success team of having an angel and some of the clearpoint folks and then kind of partnering with our technology folks at JEA and seeing how we can better work in clearpoint.

Awesome. So one final thing as we wrap up is what would you tell somebody who's just getting started with their kind of strategy management process or with clearpoint?

Just get in there, just dive in there, just play around with the different features and explore. Just like with any technology, you can't break anything. Just, just get in there and really, truly see how you want your strategy to be visualized. Once you come out with that vision and that template, then work with clearpoint Success team to see how it can be stretched in clearpoint. So just dive in. Just jump in the deep.

Yeah. I think the nice thing with. With Yalls strategy at JEA is you had your blue page, and so it's like, okay, we have these components. Let's look at what that would look like. And then from there, it was like you took it down to the agencies or to the departments, right?

Yes.

And so it was like, once we got the first part going, then it was like, well, all these departments do need to link up to it, so how do we get to that next step? And the next step, rather than. I think you have a couple hundred users in clearpoint right now. So rather than.

Yes.

Trying to get all two or 300 of them kind of working at the exact same time, it's like, let's crawl a little bit. Now we got it. See something they recognize that looks familiar and then they kind of move from there.

Absolutely. And to that point, we did a pilot group as well, so that kind of helped them get a fear. And we got user feedback from them of how clickpoint was. Yep.

Okay. Kendra, this was great. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. I learned a lot. Hopefully others did. We did get a lot of questions, so that was really nice. So I really do appreciate you taking the time to share how you manage strategy at jea.

Awesome. Thank you, Ted and clearpoint. I appreciate the opportunity.

All right, see you later. Bye.