City of St. Albert

A dynamic planning and reporting process

The City of St. Albert, also known as the Botanical Arts City, is a community of around 70,000 in Alberta, Canada. Anita Johnson, Strategic Business Advisor for the city and ClearPoint Community advisory board member, describes how ClearPoint Strategy helps manage and report on both internal and external strategic plans.

Watch the full interview here!

About the City of St. Albert

The City of St. Albert is in Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1861 and proclaimed a town in 1904. The city's 2024 municipal census counted a population of 72,316. Council sets a strategic plan for each term to identify what it will focus on, and the 2026-2029 Council Strategic Plan outlines three key strategic priorities. The city publishes StATracker, a performance dashboard that collects performance data to increase operational transparency. More information is on the city's official website.

The Plan

St. Albert's city council supports key corporate processes within the organization, handles corporate-wide strategic planning and reporting, and helps departments develop business plans and project change management activities.

Every four years, when a new council is elected, the mayor and councilors develop a new strategic plan outlining what they aim to achieve over their term. A corporate business plan mirrors it, in two sections: priority projects or initiatives linked to the council's strategic plan, and internal priority initiatives that support delivery of programs and services to the community. Council priorities focus on the community overall, while internal priorities are corporate practices, like HR or IT, that keep the organization running. The strategic plan has an external focus; the internal plan blends both together.

Reporting on these plans is quarterly, and both plans are reviewed and updated annually. That lets the council adjust to emerging issues and stay current on what is happening in the city.

The Challenge

Before ClearPoint Strategy, strategic planning and reporting were labor-intensive. The team collected information through emails and Excel sheets and compiled it into a Word document, so the report had to be rebuilt every quarter. It was slow and demanded a high level of Excel knowledge from the team.

The Solution

ClearPoint Strategy streamlined and automated processes that need "lots of involvement from lots of people," such as data updaters and report builders. It provided the platform for a corporate business plan scorecard where each initiative is linked to both a council priority and an internal priority, so reports come from a single data set. With ClearPoint, the team can easily retire old projects, add new ones, and extend timeframes every year. Johnson also likes the sequential period views. When the community has questions or concerns, the city can look at project progress over time and make evidence-based decisions about what is best to deliver.

ClearPoint also enabled a public dashboard that updates automatically from the ClearPoint system. According to Johnson, the IT department absolutely loves this because it eliminates manual maintenance on their end. St. Albert's dashboard was under construction at the time. Because the city must publish reports to the community, it would use the dashboard to keep people informed with charts and graphs, lists of services, and metrics pulled straight from its ClearPoint account.

Moving to ClearPoint cut report creation time from an estimated 100 hours to 25, which frees up capacity for the team to deliver to the community.

"ClearPoint really reduced our overall time for the process - about 75%."

The Results

1. Improved Reporting: With ClearPoint, the City of St. Albert produces more insightful reports, tracks progress over time, and makes evidence-based decisions. Council and the community can better understand the progress of various initiatives.
2. Service Level Inventory Management: ClearPoint tracks St. Albert's service level inventories (both internal and external), which set the direction for business planning, budgeting, and service delivery in the city. This large "library" of city services is stored in ClearPoint for easy reference and annual updates. Every year, when departments are approached with council motions and services need to change, executive leadership can approve the changes and automatically generate reports with the year's updates. Having everything in one place makes it easy to compare previous service levels against new changes. As the city implements priority-based budgeting (tying the budget to inventories), ClearPoint helps council decide which projects may need to halt to accomplish something else without increasing the budget.
3. Integrated Planning: ClearPoint integrates multiple plans developed at different time scales, from ten-year municipal development plans to five-year mid-range department plans. Scorecards track departments' own initiatives and others they are responsible for in other plans. That helps keep the organization aligned and promotes cooperation between departments. Leadership also gets a bird's-eye view of capacity throughout the organization.
4. Increased Buy-in: Seeing all projects in one place gives everyone a clear line of sight. Increased buy-in from stakeholders results in more coordinated strategy execution. Johnson emphasizes the power of employees seeing the big-picture value of what they have been asked to do.

Johnson gives a walkthrough of St. Albert's account setup in our customer interview webinar (19:07). Watch now!

The Future

The City of St. Albert planned to integrate ClearPoint further into its operations. Plans included a corporate risk registry, further improvements to dashboard statistics, and the integration of other planning and delivery processes into ClearPoint.

St. Albert's experience shows the value of starting small and building up. By exploring more of the capabilities, the city saved significant time and improved the quality of its reporting and strategic planning. According to Johnson, "ClearPoint has been a great tool to show where we are and where we are headed."

Want to see what ClearPoint can do for your organization? Schedule a demo.