Strategy Management with the City of Coral Springs, FL

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for our customer interview webinar. Today we are welcoming Nicole Giordano, Performance Management Manager with the City of Coral Springs. She will be sharing her insights into how their city manages strategy. Interviewing Nicole 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. Go ahead and take it away, Ted.

Okay, thank you Jenna, and welcome. Nicole, thank you for joining us. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Coral Springs and your role there?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. So, a little bit about Coral Springs. We are located in Broward County. We are about 20 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale. We border the Everglades and other cities within Broward county like Tamarack, Margate, Parkland. We are a master planned community for over 130,000 residents, meaning that we offer mixed use residential with robust amenities. We have 49 parks within Coral Springs, so we offer what we call everything under the sun. We, we have 16 departments and that includes our own fire and Police Department and 936 employees that serve city of Coral Springs. We consider ourselves a young city. We just celebrated 60 years in July. Like the city, I am fairly new with Coral Springs. I have been here just shy of three years as the performance management manager. I work within our budget and sustainability department and in my role I assist the departments with their performance plans, specifically the tracking and communication of our organization's strategic and business plans.

Oh, excellent. So yeah, let's take a step back. How does give us kind of an overview of how strategic planning works at Coral Springs.

So our strategic plan starts with our community. Annually we distribute a community and business survey. So we're gathering that input and applying all of our listening avenues to ensure that we're deriving a plan for the community by the community. This information is collected and reviewed during our annual strategic planning workshops that we hold in February. And from there we incorporate that plan into our upcoming fiscal year. Last year we did do a multi year plan, mainly due to the long term and large scale projects that came from the American Rescue Plan act funding that we received. Our existing plan does capture those projects and was extended to a two year plan. But even with our multi year plan, we review our situational analysis and our performance management annually.

Okay, excellent. Do the residents realize when they're filling out their annual survey that they're kind of directly impacting the plan?

You know, we hope so. We, we make sure to go over that during our budget presentations. We do hold a budget academy annually, so we do try and hit it home that this, this information is important and you play a very vital role in it.

So is the Budget Academy for residents just kind of explaining how your budget works?

Yes, our Budget Academy is for our residents. It goes over the process, how the strategic plan plays into that process. It's really open to anybody that wants to attend. And then during that, we give a preview of what we anticipate that upcoming budget to look like. So we give them information on how it's formulated, where we're getting the information, and ideally where we hope to take it in the next fiscal year.

That's a, it's a great way to do like a preemptive strike on educating people about the budget. So the normal questions come up. I'm sure you're already answered them in the academy, so. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, ideally, yes, that is the hope.

So how do you structure this strategic plan like the annual plan? What does it look like?

So for our plan, we follow a Baldrige approach when we're developing, implementing and communicating our strategic plan so it is directly aligned with our vision, our mission and our core organizational values. Our vision within the city of Coral Springs is to be the premier community in which to live, work and raise a family. During our strategic and our budget process, we refer to our vision statement. And how are we going to define Premier? We use a gauge throughout this process to identify the level of funding for our initiatives and where on that gauge would be our anticipated reserves, our staffing levels and some additional factors into that. By defining what Premier looks like, we're able to identify what we hope to accomplish in that plan. So really looking at the results at a results driven type plan, within the plan itself, we have 28 key intended outcomes, our kios that we use to show that by achieving this, these kios, we are in fact achieving our strategic plan. Also within the plan is the initiatives that have been identified for the year. When I started with the city, we had a plan that consisted of 40 initiatives. Following the American Rescue Plan funding that we received, our plan grew to 62 initiatives. So we, we do have a really large scale, almost a year plan for this year. But each of our initiatives are linked to our five strategic goals for the city. And that is to be a family friendly community, an active, healthy community, an attractive community, a thriving, resilient business community, and an innovative, high performing, sustainable organization. So throughout this process, we have that consistent alignment with our goals. Our mission and our vision. And it keeps our, our organization informed on what we are working on and why we're working on it.

Okay, that's great. I'm going to see if I heard you correctly. I'm going to try to repeat it back because there's a lot in a strategic plan. So you have five major goals kind of go across the city and you have 28 key intended outcomes that linked to those goals. Are those like key performance indicators? Yes. Okay. And then you have 62 initiatives that are multi year because many of them are driven from some, some ARPA funding. But there are 62 initiatives that impact those 28 key intended outcomes that are all aligned across the five goals. Does that sound right? Yes. And I think early on you said you had 28 departments. There are 14 departments.

16. 16 departments.

I should have written that one. Are your 16 departments, do they have five goals? Is like the same five goals or how do, how do you think about getting those departments aligned in this goals, intended outcomes and initiatives.

So all of our, yes, all of our departments refer back to our strategic goals. Even honestly when they're submitting something for our commission agenda. We identify for what is being requested or anything that's going to the commission, what strategic goal is that tying into. So there's a lot of integration between the departments that we are all working towards these five goals. Each department does have their own mission. Right. They have their own mission, they have their core processes. But still these are things that, that, that department is offering as a service to the community that is still, still aligned. Directly align. Right. We're, we're all working towards our vision to be the premier community. So that's kind of how we, it's still aligned, but a little bit separate. If that answers.

No, no, it's great. It's actually back when I was working with doctors Norton Kaplan, they would say you want to put strategy at the center of the management process. And it sounds like that's what you're doing, right, is it's not budget at the center of the process, but it's we need budget in order to implement this strategic goal. And so that's what we're, we're looking for. Whether it's at, you know, a department that's focused on public works or a department that's focused on arts and recreation. You're still putting strategy at the center.

Yeah. And when we, we talk about strategy and budget, it is definitely a hand in a hand in hand process. Our strategic plan, we say that a strategic plan not linked to a budget is an unfunded dream. And on the other hand, resource allocation without big picture thinking is unresponsive to future conditions. So that is something, that's something that.

We say, definitely going to listen to this recording. So at the department level, I know you have like these strategic initiatives are being implemented at the department level, do they have other initiatives as well, like business initiatives of sorts? How does that work?

They do. So in general, our departments, they play a key role in our strategic planning process overall. So our departments and our employees complete a SWOC analysis and that's something that's also provided to our boards, committees and groups. So any volunteer residents that we have throughout the year, and we consider them our state stakeholders in our organization. So when we're going through this, they have insight and experience to really identify our advantages and possible ways to improve in terms of our strategic plan. So we identify our initiatives. In that workshop that we hold in February, our department directors are present with the commission. So they're all reviewing the content that we collect from our surveys from those listening components and then also any market environment conditions. So we're really giving that, that big picture future where we are going in terms of our, our business initiatives. So our strategic planning is kind of like that, that big picture, that unfunded dream. Right. But it's our guidebook. But then going into our business initiatives, those are directly included in our budget process. So annually during budget, our departments submit any projects or programs, ideas, any operational needs that they have as part of that, and then we review them with the departments and we identify can we afford to own what we currently own? Does this align with our vision, our mission and our strategic goals? And then initiatives are selected as part of that review and put into our business plan. So we have that, that feeder pattern. Right. Our strategic plan is our guidebook. Our business plan is what those funded initiatives from both strategic and business are compiled and then put into our annual fiscal year budget.

Excellent. And you said you meet with the departments to work on this. How often do y' all meet monthly?

Monthly I meet with our department directors, the assistant director and an updater. So somebody within the department that has been identified as our Clearpoint Updater, we go through their initiatives and their KPIs. We have a monthly report that we call a snapshot that's auto generated from clearpoint and it is provided to those directors and the assistant directors. We created this so that they didn't have to actually log into the system to see how they're performing on a quarterly Basis, we report this information out to the commission and to the public. So after those quarterly reports and report out, we then update our community dashboard. We do this all the way until the end of the fiscal year. We celebrate our wins and then we begin preparation for the next year and that strategic planning workshop in February.

Excellent. It sounds like you're busy, one person meeting with all 16 departments every single month producing snapshots for them, updating your public facing dashboard.

It is, it is definitely a lot of work. I would say that there are two very key contributors to our set, our success. The first being automation. The automation features that we have in clearpoint, the workflows that I was able to set up, it takes the responsibility from me having to manually ask people, hey, did you make your updates? We're going to meet at this time, having that, that email that's sent directly to them, it identifies the initiatives and the KPIs that are due for that reporting period. It's really a seamless process and definite takes a large, a large portion of that work off my plate. The second that I would say is customization. I'm sure, you know, everybody has experienced. Every department has their own unique needs. So being able to create standardized reports across the organization is really great. But also being able to really meet the need of our end users within our organization has been really helpful. I'm able to add columns to let them know who updated it last, let them know when things are due. Some departments like to look at stuff from a quarter to quarter, some like to look at it from a month to month. So really getting into the information that's in the system and being able to just automate it and customize it for each of each of our departments is really great.

No, that's, that's fantastic and good to hear. Would you be comfortable sharing anything?

Yeah, absolutely.

Some of this customization.

So when we get into. Oh, maybe when we. Can you see it?

Yes.

Okay. When we get into clearpoint, this is our landing page for our departments. So you can see we have our logo and these are our core values as an organization. Which is the TRAILS acronym from, from this too. We have all of our strategic plan. So these are our initiatives for the year and part of the performance reports that we. There we go. We have. So it has our, our time status as we go through the fiscal year, our analysis, the department and the percent complete. As you can see, we do have some that already are completed for the fiscal year, but those were items that were part of those ARPA plans and the, the multi year. So we do have some things that we've already completed for the year. One thing that I really love that found out this year, the departments uploaded their slides into the analysis. So I really thought that was a great feature. Rather than having to duplicate the information that they have, they were just able to drop it in our business plan. Initiatives are set up a little bit different, but we can see those, you can see their goals, their initiatives. And same with the departments and the analysis. This is an example of our snapshot. So this is what comes to the department on a monthly basis. I was able to make my own cover so the departments know what it is and it just kind of gives a snapshot of where we're at. This example is from our end of year, so you can see where we, where we landed last fiscal year. But it has the KPI for that department where they were at and the analysis for it. And then it also gives a snapshot of our initiatives. So where we are at with our existing initiatives, these were carryovers as well. But then this is our dashboard. So this is the external facing what our community is able to see. Again, it links to our five strategic goals so they can select one. Get in there and see our existing KPIs and initiatives that we have listed in there. And this information is part of what our, we have as our quarterly updates. So again this is reflective of last fiscal year and then at end of December we will start getting into fiscal year 2020 for.

That's excellent. It's like a fully integrated system where what you log in and see is the same as what you would get in a department in a, in a snapshot and it matches what the public's going to see on your public facing dashboard.

Yeah. But I do love too that there are features. So when we want to trial a new KPI or if the department wants to, to start putting information, I do love that there's, there's still capabilities to make it internal facing only so we have that, that period of time to, to test it out, set targets before we then move forward to a more public facing. So I, I do love that we have flexibility to, to just try. Right. Strive.

Yeah, that's great. And since you've been working on this for a while, I mean it looks like it's, it's, it's a, it's a perfect integrated system. Did all of your departments just jump in and said yeah, let's help you with reporting or like what were the, you know, any challenges you saw? You don't need to call out team members by name, but how did you overcome them to, to, to get people involved to, to make this work.

When I, when I started with the city, I was actually really fortunate to kind of walk into that buy in. It was already set up for me. But I will say that our, our organization as a whole really gives us the, the space and the freedom and the support to, to take some big sw. I say on my calls with my departments, none of us are actively trying to underperform. But in those scenarios, there's really a story to tell. We know through some of the departments that they have to be staffed at this level to be operating at this level. So being able to help them walk through those stories and share information, to be able to pivot, you know, and make, make changes throughout the year has been really great. I would say that the departments, I, I just, I'm really fortunate. I have a lot of departments that they're, they understand the importance of this. They, they have the buy in and they're there to, to help me make sure that we're, we're communicating the best version of ourselves, both internally and externally. So that is one thing that has been really great. We make changes. Right. We make changes annually. So really trying to meet the needs of our end users within our organization gives us a lot of flexibility and, and understanding from the departments. Right. In order to make this a seamless process like I do on my side, need to make it easy and consistent and having that, having that framework already set up for me within clearp definitely, definitely drives our success.

Yeah. So let's, so we did get a question from the, the audience that says, you know, they also use the Baldrige framework. I want to know if you found opportunities to build Baldrige criteria questions within clearpoint to ensure that you have strategy, performance, workforce alignment. I know that y', all, you know, we're the first city to win Baldrige, which is a fabulous accomplishment. You're also really active in what I would call the Florida. They probably wouldn't want to be referred to as a Baldrige Award, but the Sterling Award, which focuses also on performance management in Florida and doing other things. So how do you think about structuring criteria whether it's around Sterling or Baldrige, you know, into clearpoint or in your overall process?

So we've done it both ways. Right. So originally within our budget process, we had a document when the departments are submitting any new initiatives and they have to identify how, what they're asking for has that alignment between our mission, our vision statement and our core value or our strategic. We were able through clearpoint to actually incorporate that part of the budget process within the ClearPoint platform. So now I have boxes that the departments then say within their requests how, how they have that alignment, if there's any existing KPIs that we could use within that initiative. Request, request to say this is how we're going to track its performance directly related to an existing KPI. So that is one way that we've been able to incorporate that framework into our budget process and then continue that throughout as we move to a more automated and digital platform with clearpoint.

Yeah, that's great. I know we're running out of time, so let's talk about what you're planning to do next with clearpoint. You showed us like a really great kind of integrated process with your departments linking to the enterprise and the snapshots and the public dashboards. What else are you thinking about?

So right now we're actually working with you guys to update our community dashboard. We really want to highlight our kios and our initiatives directly around the strategic plan. So making the information more visible, on the forefront with less clicks. So that is something that we are hoping to have launched by the end of Q1. We want to expand the performance section of our budget process. So this year we tied in the initiatives into clearpoint. The department submitted them directly directly into the system, which I love because it creates a historical digital library. So we always have that information. But really building that out a little bit more as part of performance, the departments have to update their mission and their core processes. So seeing how we can also put that into the clearpoint system and having them update, the last thing that we have that we are working on is a map. Right. Everybody likes to look at information a little bit different, differently. Some people are very visual, some people like the data straight up. So we were able to create a map in ArcGIS and we import the updates directly from Clearpoint. So we don't have departments that have to make updates here and then make updates here. It's all in one place and it's centralized, but we're able to then put that information into a map so it's consistent. And we are going to work on embedding that map into the data dashboard as well. So we have that visual component there.

That's great. You know, you always hear you need to communicate kind of seven times in seven ways. And when you really start to see data. Right. Some people just look at kind of that spreadsheet format and they like pick it up immediately. Other people need a chart, other people need a map. And just having all the different ways is really, is really fabulous. So what, what advice do you have for someone who's just getting started? Like, just either starting with performance management overall or just getting started with clearpoint? Like, how would you. How would you advise you three years ago when you just stepped into the role?

Honestly, three years. Three years ago, I took a leap of faith and I would take that leap. There is a support net within clearpoint that I can say they, they were there. They were there to train me and get me informed on the platform. I love too, that, you know, you guys are constantly improving. You're making updates to the system, even just like little things like the tabs now on the new interface, they are my favorite. But really, like I said, just. Just kind of take that leap, get started, have your plan. And it will, it will come together, applying the best practices that, you know, you guys provide to us and, and tell us how we can make what we want to accomplish visible and, and just within. Within the system.

Right? Excellent. Well, Nicole, thank you so much. I know that I did read online that Coral Springs was voted to have some of the best sunsets in Florida, so I'm jealous. We really appreciate you spending your time with us today and sharing all the great things that you all are doing here.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for having us. I appreciate it.