City of Virginia Beach

A culture of data-informed management throughout the city

The Office of Performance and Accountability (OPA) at the City of Virginia Beach runs a three-tiered performance management approach. The lean office handles several projects and functions to build a culture of data-informed management across city departments.

The city revamped its performance management program and adopted ClearPoint Strategy to track progress and manage data visualization for departments and their stakeholders. The aim was to improve efficiency, increase transparency, and build a data-driven culture across all departments.

OPA Director Tam Nguyen talks about the city's strategic plan, Department Performance Plans (DPPs), and management.

Watch the full interview here!

About the City of Virginia Beach

Virginia Beach is a coastal city in the southeastern corner of Virginia. It has a population of 450,000 residents, making it the largest city in Virginia and the 39th largest in the United States. An 11-member City Council governs the city, and the Council appoints the City Manager. The city's Office of Performance and Accountability uses data and nationwide best practices to improve how work gets done. Departmental Performance Plans describe each department's projects, goals, challenges and achievements. The city's official site is virginiabeach.gov.

VB Stat

"VB Stat" runs focused performance assessments based on organizational priorities. Its purpose is to keep organizational goals in front of stakeholders, with frequent meetings that track the progress and effectiveness of different projects. One example is Virginia Beach's "Rescue Stat," which evaluates and improves emergency response times. Stakeholders such as EMS, 311, 911, and the fire department attend and make real-time decisions based on the data.

VB Strat

"VB Strategy" is the strategic planning component. It translates the city council's vision and community feedback into a workable strategy that aligns resources and effort. The two-year plan is updated bi-annually with performance reports and highlights for transparency and accountability. ClearPoint replaced older, more limited tools like Excel spreadsheets in implementing VB Strategy.

ClearPoint lets the city create separate scorecards for each of the five key focus areas of the strategy. That keeps stakeholders focused on their own areas of responsibility without overwhelming them with irrelevant information, and it has simplified performance reporting and tracking.

ClearPoint's user-friendly features and its ability to manage multiple programs and scorecards have improved the office's efficiency and effectiveness.

It's a good tool to collect data because it streamlines a lot of the process - less cumbersome and a lot easier to digest.

With ClearPoint, the OPA has designed a strategic plan that is comprehensive, clear, and accessible to stakeholders. Each scorecard shows the intentions, objectives, milestones, and performance measures for its focus area.

The same structure is used across scorecards, so the format is consistent and easy to navigate. Besides providing transparency, the scorecards serve as a discussion platform in quarterly meetings with the city manager, where the group celebrates wins, identifies challenges, and explores potential synergies between departments.

Nguyen gives a tour of Virginia Beach's ClearPoint account in our webinar (9:22, 13:40). Watch now!

VB Performance

The "VB Performance" system works alongside VB Strategy. While VB Strat handles the broader strategic plan for key focus areas, VB Performance covers the two-year performance plans of individual departments. These Department Performance Plans (DPPs) capture key initiatives, aligned performance measures, and progress evaluations.

It's a platform to talk about the synergies that may occur.

Each department under the purview of the city manager has a DPP, which includes information like the mission and vision, a two-year performance plan, budgetary details, and key metrics. These are publicly available and updated monthly, with quarterly meetings held with the city manager to review progress.

Before-and-After

Before ClearPoint, Virginia Beach monitored strategy and performance initiatives in Excel spreadsheets. ClearPoint streamlined data collection and analysis, saved time, and simplified how data is presented. It generates charts and graphs automatically and makes presentations easier for the city and stakeholders to digest. When the interview was recorded, the city had not yet fully integrated all VB Stat items into ClearPoint, but it had begun tracking several city-wide projects and had plans to expand.

ClearPoint is a one-stop-shop for not only our OPA work, but budget work as well.

The city also upgraded its software license to allow more active users, reflecting its commitment to increasing usage.

See how other organizations in Virginia are leveraging ClearPoint in our State Spotlight series

One Year of ClearPoint

Virginia Beach shared advice for new users or those considering a move from Excel. Nguyen recommends a "crawl, walk, run" approach, since usage evolves as organizations learn and discover new features. After one year of use, the city recognized there are still many features to explore.

It's not about streamlining a process… it's an entirely new rhythm that we've found now, which we really love.

Learn how ClearPoint can help other local governments. Schedule a free demo.