ClearPoint Community: South Florida Regional Meeting

We were joined by twenty-two representatives from the City of Fort Lauderdale, who graciously served as host for the meeting, the City of Miami, the City of Tamarac, Sarasota County, St. Lucie County and the University of Miami.

Why do we host these meetings?  We have a vibrant and robust community, and our clients love to follow each other’s successes and learn from each other’s challenges. So, in short, our ClearPoint Community loves to share!  By connecting our clients to their peers, we hope to build these relationships.  The South Florida community is exceptional, and their love for strategy and performance management is evident.  Want to learn more?  Just check out our recap of the meeting below.

We kicked off the meeting with a review of the agenda and facilitated introductions by organization.  To spice it up, we asked each participant to share a “fun fact” about themselves.  (To my sincere delight, we had a number of fellow animal lovers in the room!)  The heart of the meeting – best practice sharing – followed.  ClearPoint Community members shared their current processes around strategy and performance management and how ClearPoint is used for strategy execution and reporting, which led to opportunities for discussion, lots of interaction among participants, and complementary best practice sharing.  We heard several common themes:

The importance of taking a step back

Most of our communities started somewhere.  Although their starting points vary, in all cases, at some point, leadership had to take a step back and look at the big picture.  This meant asking tough questions particularly at the department level. What is our core function? What are we underestimating? What’s got to go? What brings values vs. what is done because it’s habit? What are we losing at? Who’s doing it better?  This act of taking a step back was paramount to each community’s journey.

Collaboration as the mechanism for alignment

Although progressing at different rates, each community discussed an important stage of their performance management journey – alignment.  Key to this alignment was the collaborative environment established among departments and leadership.  We heard of various ways of fostering collaboration through structured meetings including monthly deep dives at the department level, quarterly leadership report outs, and board and council strategic planning retreats.

Accountability and strategy execution using ClearPoint

Accountability is key!  One community stated, “we wanted to hold ourselves responsible to the plan.” Another mentioned that all action items or budget proposals “must be tied to the strategic plan.”   Each community leverages ClearPoint to manage strategic plans, objectives, measures, initiatives and dashboards - tools that leadership teams in government rely on to make more accurate data-driven decisions and ensure transparency, accountability, and follow-through.

We then walked the group through several innovative ways ClearPoint clients are using the software.  This included the following examples:

Project Evaluations

Johnson County, Kansas uses ClearPoint’s automatic project evaluations to determine the RAG status of their initiatives. Automatic project evaluations allow you to chart and calculate the data associated with your projects, and assign evaluations based off a wide range of criteria.

Gauge Dashboard

The City of Austin’s Resource Recovery Division displays a dashboard from ClearPoint on their intranet to share progress data about each of their departments. Viewers can see a high-level summary of performance and then drill-down for more detailed information.

Leadership Engagement

The City of Durham, NC and City of Raleigh, NC have leveraged scorecard reports in innovative ways to drive additional engagement.

Business Plans

The City of Vaughan, ON uses ClearPoint’s customizable pod and table styles to create a comprehensive view of a department business plan.

User Buy-In

The City of Charlottesville has developed two internal documents, which demonstrate the City’s effectiveness in communicating their strategy and shows how ClearPoint is entrenched in their strategic planning process.

Automation

We then walked the group through our own automation of reporting in ClearPoint.

Finally, we wrapped up the meeting with an update on ClearPoint’s 2019 Strategy and Performance Management Summit, which will be held in Durham, NC on June 4^th-6^th and an overview of upcoming features in ClearPoint, which will enable our clients to connect, collaborate and share with their peers.

To access the master presentation, click here. We hope to see you at a ClearPoint Community Regional Meeting in the near future!