Transforming Governance: Strategic Planning with the City of St. Cloud, FL

Welcome Abyssmail. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about and, and your role there.

Yes. The city of St. Cloud is located in central Florida. We are 40 minutes south of downtown Orlando and we're one of the fastest growing communities in the state. Since I started seven years ago in the planning department, we were community of roughly 35,000. Now we're close to 70. So we closed very much double our population in those years. So growth hasn't stopped. We continue to grow. So we're excited. Like I mentioned, I started in the planning department, worked my way up to the city manager's office in my current capacity, I'm responsible for the city strategic plan as well as I oversee a few departments as part of my duties. So that's a little bit about me there. Yes.

Okay, great. So let's jump into the strategic planning process at St. Cloud. Tell me a little bit about how it's evolved over time.

So the city of St. Cloud adopted a five year strategic plan back in 2018. It wasn't being tracked properly, hence the reason why my current position was design to make sure that we don't fall behind in those things. It was very cumbersome to track it. We didn't have the right technology. We were using Excel spreadsheets. Things weren't being as efficient as they could have been. So basically it was a three year period that not much was tracked or completed. When I took over this project Back in 2021, I took a look at the strategic plan and I was like, hey, we might need to do some tweaks. Back then we just had overall goals, but we didn't have any objectives or any KPIs or anything like that. So in 2021, we embarked in the journey of revamping our strategic plan to put together some more specifications to help us track and help us see when we're being successful or what we're slacking. So in 2021 we revamped some of the goals. We added objectives, we added KPIs, and we also added the services of Clearpoint Strategies to help us track those things. So no longer we're using Excel, now we're doing everything to clearpoint.

That sounds great. Do you have departments also? Do they have their own plans or do they call them strategic plans? Are they a different kind of plan? How do you think about that at the Department of.

So every department has their business plan. We do an annual business plan with the city based on our fiscal year. So from October to September it is tied to our Budget. We are tracking that in clearpoint. Every department has their own portal. If you want me to show you, if we can jump on that real quick, let me share my screen. Click share. Excellent. So every department, this is our clearpoint portal here. And as you can see in this column for the fiscal year 2324, every single department has their own business plan portal. Let me jump on one right now, which is the building departments. It provides a little bit overview of what the department does. We have some strategic issues the department is currently going through and those are the things that they best base their business plan on. They provide initiatives. And those initiatives have to tie directly to their strategic plan goals and objectives. So that's how we keep the linkage between them. If I can show you some of the elements here that the building department is currently working on. They have four initiatives and they are designed to try to complete or advance an initiative for an objective in their strategic plan. If we can click on one real quick review current fee schedule. It's a simple one that a lot of municipalities do. It's set up very nicely. Here you can see the linkage, what type of what objective or element in the strategic plan. This is trying to address who's responsible for the start date and estimated completion date, what's the desired outcome. And then this is the box where department directors go ahead and input their initiative update. What that does to us is help us track. Every department is reporting quarterly on this initiative and at the same time they are reporting quarterly to the city managers. So how this works is every quarter at the end of the, at the end of the fiscal quarter, which for a fact is going to be July 1st. So July 1st, every department director is going to receive an email. Please log into clearpoint and provide your updates on your initiatives. They have a 15 day period and where they can provide those Updates. Or from July 1 to July 15 and after July 15, every single department meets with our city manager and executive officers to go over their initiatives. That's when they discuss challenges, successes, where we are, if we're still on track or not. At the end of that, we compiled all that information and we used our briefing book option that we have here in clearpoint, have already uploaded and loaded it. So for the ease of this webinar. So it shows something like this, here you can see a snapshot of everything that was accomplished in the quarter. So we're looking at quarter two for this current fiscal year. We have a snapshot. We have a total of 95 strategic initiatives. So these are all of the projects capital and strategic initiative related to the strategic plan that the departments are working on. We have roughly 15 departments, so we have a total of 95 of them. We have a snapshot of how many have been completed so far. So we have a 27 out of the 9,527 completed throughout the first two quarters of the fiscal year. 64 on target, three falling in the caution category and one that has not started. So this gives you an overview of where we are as well as a visual representation of it. And then I provide also a small analysis based on the discussions of the major things that were accomplished to give you examples. Adoption of the parks and recreation comprehensive plan element and the water comprehensive plan element, as well as some annexations that were completed that we had as part of our of our business plans. If you want to go more in depth, then you have your individual reports and this is tied to the strategic plan. And then again everything that's related to economic development and all of the projects will be here represented with their name, desired outcome and the initiative for the quarter. So that way those in the community, our city council and our management staff can clearly see what has been done.

Right. This is, this is really amazing. I have a lot of questions, so thanks for, thanks for sharing this. I love the, the branding of it that you've pulled from your logo directly into clearpoint looks like it makes it nice and friendly. We did get a question as you've been sharing. This is. It's. Are you using any live data sources? Are you connecting clearpoint to any other data sources to pull data in automatically? I can answer the second half question which is like does clearpoint do this? Yeah. Does clearpoint have the capability? But, but first in cloud, are you using any of that capability?

Currently we're not. We're kind of limited on where we can pull data from. Our ERP system is a little outdated. We're actually working towards operating so we don't have a direct connection. What there's a lot of manual label data loading that's being done currently. Just so I can show you our key performance indicators we have at the moment. Let me show you this. The construction valuation that we're tracking, the director will automatically go in here and do the calculations themselves through other parties softwares that we have like Cognos I believe is where they pull this from and they will run those reports. They know which reports they have to run quarterly or in this case every fiscal year and they will load their information here. So right now we do not have a direct linkage because we're limited on where we have the data located.

No, no, that's great. I appreciate the honest answer for the person that asked the question. ClearPoint can pull in information from CSV, from Excel and through SQL queries, and we do have an open API, so it is possible. But just the same way that Abysmal described is there, a lot of organizations will say, well, yeah, it's possible, but it's easier for me just to run a report and type in one annual piece of information if you're seeing here. So, so let's jump back a little bit into this, the, the, the process because we got another question was like, how did you implement the strategic planning process? You know, all at once or department by department? And I think let's. So I want you to start with kind of the way you described it. So in 2018 you had this plan. In 2021 you realized, I don't, I don't want to say, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it wasn't much of a plan. And so you had to kind of bring it, bring it to life. And then you just kind of say, well, and then all the departments had their business plans. The departments always have their business plans. Like, walk us through that process of getting department plans to link to that strategic plan. And, and, and did you do it alone? The, the, the next question is also, did you use consultants or kind of how, how did that process work?

So everything done from 2018 to 2023 are five years. No consultant involved in that one. It was mostly us, the executive, the directors, the city council, working on refining our strategic plan, when it came to explaining the new process of how are we going to do things, we're no longer using Excel. We're going to use this software. As many municipalities might know, change is never an easy thing. It took roughly 18 months for everybody to become on board and know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. That took a lot of instructions, SOPs on how to update your, your initiatives, making sure that your automation on emails goes out, that you're constantly communicating with the departments. The directors, they're very busy people. So when you add another task that they have to do, obviously they, they usually freak out sometimes. But you also, you also have your, your secondary staff that they have. So the deputies gets involved. So every single initiative has a owner and a collaborator. So both of them can provide information so we can share the, share the work. We also hide every director evaluation based on how successful their business plan is. So when you add that as an incentive, say, hey, this is how good you, you'll be rated. And I commend our City manager, Veronica Miller for taking this step, is that she emphasizes, this is how we're going to move forward to make sure that we keep organized and focused. You will be graded based on how well you perform on your business plan and your budget will be based on your business plan. So the things that you asked, so that's how you put that linkage. The strategic plan is a plan, but the way you implement that is through this business plan and ultimately your ultimate implementation tool, which is your budget. So, so that's how we provide that incentive. It took a roughly 18 months since, since the implementation of Clearpoint for everyone to understand the value of it and for everyone to very know how to log in and provide their, their initiatives, updates and all that stuff. So yeah, it took a lot of, a lot of hard work. But now we're in a, in a stage in, in, in the city that it's, it's second nature.

That's great. Were there, were there business plans prior to clearpoint and were they kind of connected to the, the strategic plan or were there just kind of standard operating plans? Like what it, what was the business plan like? Kind of prior to, to clearpoint there.

Were, but prior to clearpoint, everything was very siloed. Every department knew what they were supposed to be working on, but there wasn't a lot of sharing and collaborating. So to give you an example, let's say the police department say, hey, we're deploying this software next year, but now it doesn't know that. So they can plan correctly and plan their business plan around that. So that's, that's what we found before when we introduced this new process. We, we hold this quarterly meetings, we hold this annual business plan retreats where we create our business plan and, and share with everyone. So now procurement knows what's going on. So now they know what to expect next, next fiscal year. Now it knows what to expect next fiscal year. So we have reduced those silos in, in operations and they have helped us become more efficient.

That's great. So we got another, getting a lot of questions. So, so very happy that, that you're sharing. Can you describe the relationship between the business plan, its evaluation and budget adjustments? So you know, in simple terms, like, how does this budget, you know, like, like how does this process work.

In relation to management? Or I'm, I'm assuming it's more when council Sets a request that, hey, we would like to have X amount of things done. Usually that always, never happens, right? So council will tell you to do something. So we go ahead and look at our business plan. Our council understands our process and our capacity. If it's a project that can be easily achieved and that we do not need any type of budget amendment or things like that, we'll go ahead and add it to the business plan for the department. If it's something that will require a budget amendment, things of that sort, or take away from other projects, we bring it to council's attention and basically ask them, hey, FYI, we, you gave us this priority. We were already working on this. We were going to have to push something to next fiscal year in this business plan. What would you like it to be? Help us what, prioritize things. And we usually take care of that at their strategic planning retreat with them every year. But things happen throughout the fiscal year that we'd make adjustments and, and so far what we have seen is that those type of requests, because we do such a good job planning now, those type of requests happen less and less. And when they do happen, then we use our business plan to help us prioritize and council can see we're working towards it. If we are, if not, then we'll add it to the plan. It could be this year or next year. But something has to give to make sure that we have the capacity to get the job done.

No, it sounds, I mean, it really sounds like you, you're using clearpoint as a, a great communication tool for your council and they're now buying in. So, you know, we've always like, had this dream of like, okay, you want to do something? Well, what do you want us to stop doing? Or where are we going to get the money and the time and the resources and now you have a mechanism to, to share like, okay, this is what we're already doing and we're fully, we're at full capacity. So you know, what do you want us to stop doing or where are we going to get more money from? Correct. Okay, let's talk a little bit more because again, I have two more questions before we kind of go through what I was hoping we were, what I was planning we were going to talk about, but I think these are really interesting. And so it's someone saying, you know, we have a business plan. And so thinking about streamlining, kind of getting departments to enter in information into clearpoint for that business plan, you know, do for the way. I think this question Is, is, is do you force all the items on the business plan to link to strategy? Or there are certain elements that each plan must link to or how do you kind of think about forcing these plans to be strategic or like do you say strategy 1.1 has to be in every business plan or how do you manage that process?

Obviously not every department will have an initiative that will tie directly to an item in the strategic plan. You also have a lot of support departments that wouldn't necessarily have a big project that will tie to the strategic plan, but they do a lot of the back end work to make things happen. So what we do is that when we are business planning with the departments, I usually meet with directors one on one as we start the planning process prior to completing it fully and start sharing it. And I help them develop their strategy so they know what they have to do. My job is to make sure that it links to the strategic plan so I help them think strategically. If an initiative is I need to hire three more people, is that really strategic or is that you trying to get money to, you know, so it's like you have to tie it to something. So for you to accomplish this programming you are going to need staff. Correct. So that's going to be a milestone on your. So the overall strategy here is the program creation, not necessarily the hiring of staff. So you have to get them into that habit of thinking outside the box of set of tasks to be what's the overall program that you're trying to build. So that's how I've been able to tie things back to the strategic plan. Just helping them think and the thought process behind it and ultimately ends up in the, in the, in our budget.

Okay, that's, that's great. Okay, so now I'm going to back up because you said it took 18 months to get everything in.

Yes.

Or get every, get everything running smoothly. Right. And what you were just describing was, well, you also had to get people thinking strategically. You had to get the plans kind of linked. Well, you had to do this, you know, get these other pieces kind of moving. And I imagine that was part of that 18 month process. And so we got a question of talk about the ease of use of clearpoint and the training and getting people involved. Because I know you. I mean what depending on how well people know clearpoint, you know, it sounds like you use an automated workflow within the tool to send out an email at the beginning of every month. Everyone's busy, like, like, you know, tell the, the dirty work and the and the successes that you've had and just trying to, to teach people clearpoint so to speak. Yes.

And what I have found in, in my journey is that the hardest thing is starting it up. So the very beginning with clearpoint was how is our portal going to look like, how is our workflow going to look like? What's the, what's the template that we want to use? So building that was the hardest point in my opinion. Once you get it built and you know this is a five year plan, you don't have to change much besides just inputting new information every year as they come and things drop off the strategic plan or get completed. So the hardest point I think is you should dedicate your time fully to implementing or putting together your portal how you would like to track things. And the clearpoint team, I've been blessed with good representatives, customer success agents to that I will explain something to them, they'll give me templates. Do you like this? Do you not? And, and we go back and forth and help me build the automations that we have that we have in place exactly how we need them. And so once you build that foundation is very easy to just duplicate that moving forward. So that's one, one of the things that I enjoy. We're getting ready now. We're a new portal because we, our strategic plan expire this fiscal year so we're rolling a new one and we have to build new portals now. So now we're in the process of that. So you really have to dedicate a lot of time in the implementation of the software to make sure that you're successful after that. Developing training videos, developing training, SOPs instructions. We use our SharePoint now in the city here and I have a whole portal just on strategic planning and instructions for strategic planning and clearpoint so that if any one of the directors have ever has a question, they just have to go there instead of having to contact me. So that's what I, that's my best advice is build it from, from the very beginning how you would like it to look for the next five years and everything will run smoothly after that.

Okay, great. I know we only have a few minutes left, but you said you have a new strategic plan, right? For 2024. Tell us about it, tell us how. Like the process of getting that strategic plan, like what's the process of revising a strategic plan at St. Cloud?

Well, when the city decided to do this time around is, it's like I mentioned earlier, we only had involvement from the executive and the council in our past one. So this time around we actually had a lot of community involvement to be the very forefront. Not only community, we're also our community partners and our staff because ultimately everyone in our staff is the one will be the one responsible of doing the work to, for the success of the strategic plan. So we want to make sure that they understood what they were working towards as well. We did community visioning sessions where we have a live sketch, we have a person live sketching as people in the community provided feedback on how they would like the city to look in 30 years. We had community surveys, interviews with our staff focus groups, we had youth surveys. So we involved our school system as well community partners like the county, our water authority, our school district, like I mentioned. So it was an involvement from the community. We have strategic retreats with council where they review all that feedback and they see what the community wants, what staff wants, what we need. And from those events then we develop key focus areas where councils did. We have four of them. Economic development, high performing government, community safety and transportation were the biggest topics. So those were the key focus areas and from those we developed strategic goals and objectives as well. And ultimately we're going to have KPIs as well. I'm working on that right now. So. Yeah, so it took a lot of time. It was finally adopted in two weeks ago. So we're now in the process of importing all of that information into Clearpoint. We have changed the way that we are doing things since now we have key focus areas and then strategic goals underneath them instead of just having strategic goals. So now we have, we just added another level of tracking and, and I'm excited of how it's going to turn out.

That's great. How many people do you have in the planning department to, to help with this, you know, five year plan? Like, like how big is your department?

Well, in the city manager's office, personnel that's assigned to work in the strategic plan we have. Myself, I have an intern, Julia, that's, I believe she's in the call that has been helping me tremendously with this project. And I also have Henrietta, which is our executive admin that's helping. So it's a team of three essentially trying to do this for the city.

That's great. That sounds, it sounds like you're leveraging tools to get a lot of work done.

Yes, yes.

Which is fantastic. What else do you, what do you have next for Clearpoint? Like what are you thinking is going to be the next thing that you're Working in the tool with.

Yeah, so we started with clearpoint as the base. We have the, have the base membership. So we're looking into upgrading hopefully soon. So as we mature in our strategic planning journey, you know, integrating the data management and all that stuff that you guys have available, we're looking at the AI capabilities that you guys have as well to help us. You know, my biggest thing was getting people used to strategic planning, strategic thinking. I feel like we are at that level now and then now like you mentioned, a team of one and a team of three. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been, it's been fun. But obviously we have to evolve as the city keeps growing. So you know, leveraging technology to help municipalities of our size is a tremendous help. So looking forward to, to the things that, that were coming up from clearpoint, the new updates. But yeah, so we're working on the new portals now for our, for our new strategic plan. We're working hard on them. So hopefully by October 1st we have that rolled out ready to go.

That sounds great. I think I have time for one more question. And we got like 10 came in today during the webinar. So this has been, this has been great. Do you like, does the city have a, like a high level dashboard and do you like, do you share it at council meetings internally or do you share anything externally as well?

Yes, we do. We do have a, our KPIs are open to the public and we also do a bunch of reporting internally. Council gets a monthly capital improvement projects, updates, email and our city manager does the quarterly, does get the quarterly briefing books to make sure that everything's staying on track. So we have different levels of sharing of information and with this new plan, now that we're importing, we're going to add more to it. We're looking to redesign our portals so we can show the community more of the work that we're doing. Because unfortunately in city government sometimes you just have to show everything that you're working on to make sure that the community understands that you're working hard. Because usually what makes it on Facebook is the negative stuff. Right. So we're trying our best, our best to make sure that we're transparent with our processes and what we're working and so we can show relations. Hey, this is where the budget's going towards these products.

No, this is great. Abysmal. Thank you so much for your time and sharing this story. Greatly appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

All right. Congratulations on your success.