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Choosing software to manage your strategic plan or strategic priorities requires thoughtful consideration. Ideally, it’s about finding a partner you can grow with.
Getting high engagement and adoption from staff is where impact begins. It’s where your strategic plan comes to life and the value of your investment in a new software gets unlocked.
In this post, we’ll cover how Envisio supports adoption across departments through:
- Onboarding that’s simple and scalable for every department.
- Time-saving automation that reduces manual effort.
- Making progress visible with public dashboards and reports, without the lift.
Onboarding that’s scalable for every department
A dedicated Implementation Manager and Customer Success Manager.
We’re all about setting your team up for success. Each organization that partners with Envisio is assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM), who partners with you to create a plan to move you from one milestone to another. In addition to your CSM, when you choose Envisio, you are also supported by an implementation manager, and have access to our planning and performance coaches.
Envisio isn’t one-size-fits-all. We tailor onboarding to your team’s readiness. Part of that is understanding where you are today, and where you want to go. Understanding short and long-term growth goals enables us to work backwards to understand the steps needed to get there.
Before getting started, there are some key questions we’ll explore with you. What is your internal capacity? Do you have people to support the plan? Do those people have the right skills or require education or further training? These questions help guide the best onboarding route and what type of support is best.
Tailored to your specific needs.
Incorporating new software to manage and track your most important work is exciting, but it takes work. (Be wary of any software vendor who tells you otherwise.) Our customer success team works with you–even before your implementation kick-off–to explore your unique organizational needs. They take the time to understand your goals and challenges to create an onboarding plan that works best for you.
This process is tailored to both organization-wide and department-specific needs. Your dedicated Implementation Manager builds a step-by-step role-based onboarding journey. Plan owners, builders, analytics admins, dashboard managers—each set of users gets specific training and guidance. Goals, Objectives, Actions and Projects are assigned owners, dates, and Work Plans. Implementation isn’t a one-off meeting—it’s a process, with clearly defined steps along the way.
As your strategy and performance partner, we understand the importance of building long-term, trusted relationships. Our Customer Success Team is here to provide support and guidance, all the way from kickoff to multi-year use. We’ll help you transition from managing your plans in tools like spreadsheets, to cultivating a culture of performance and accountability. We encourage leadership involvement and staff participation from day one.
Adoption isn’t a feature, it’s a journey.
Access to our internal planning and performance management services
It’s great to have a plan, but unless it’s operationalized it will be difficult to execute. We often see plans with clear, top-level Goals and Objectives defined, but where the action and project-level details have not been built out.
That’s exactly where our consulting services can step in to help.
If your team isn’t familiar with creating SMART actions, building out detailed work plans, or performance metrics aligned with your strategy, don’t worry–that’s our expertise.
Our team of coaches lead operational planning and performance management workshops to meet you where you’re at. At Envisio we are not just about awesome software, we are about building capacity internally to support culture change. We want to help you build a solid foundation upfront that fosters team engagement and alignment and sets you up for long-term success.
We’re focused on culture change, not just software setup.
Every Envisio customer also has access to our Envisio Academy–a hub of ongoing training, best practice templates, guides, webinars, and our newly-launched guided courses.
And that’s just the beginning.
We’re also kicking off regional roundtables and our Envisionary Exchange user groups, to connect like-minded peers, for sharing ideas, and talking strategy. Plus, we’ll be hosting our very own Envisio Summit several times a year–a dedicated event series designed exclusively for our public sector customer community.
We may be a little biased, but our customer community is special. Not only because our customers are innovators and change agents, but because they all work in the public sector. We don’t work with private sector companies, so all of our resources, events, peer groups, and programs are designed for the unique needs of the public sector.
Time-saving automation that reduces manual effort
Get started quickly with our Plans Import feature
The first step to managing and tracking your plan is getting your plan into Envisio. If you’re working on any kind of cross-departmental plan this could mean compiling info across dozens of departments. Get up and running quickly with our Plans Import feature, which takes your plan content from a spreadsheet and builds it out in Envisio–it’s like magic. You can also choose to utilize best-practice project and reporting templates to get your team to value quickly.
AI Assist as your assistant
Are you responsible for tracking down updates across departments? Are you taking these updates and compiling them into a standardized report so you can report on progress to leadership, elected officials or a board? Are you doing this manually?
There is a better way!
Times are not changing, times have changed. With the advent of AI, we are all in a state of growth when it comes to increasing efficiency. With Envisio’s built-in AI Assist tools, you can save yourself hours of time managing your plan and plan updates. We know this part of the job is not what motivates you–you want to be seeing the results. So let us help you get there faster.
Envisio uses built-in reminders with calendar integrations and automated update reminders. Not only does it take the responsibility off you, but the consistency also helps to build routine and good habits.
Now with AI Assist, users can simplify their updates in a standardized format of Accomplishments, Roadblocks, and Next Steps. Department heads and your executive team can easily summarize updates across their teams into one concise update. Our newly released AI Assist Insightful Executive Summaries further enables your team to communicate progress, highlight where support is needed, and make meetings more action-oriented.
Make progress visible with public dashboards and reports—without the lift
Staff adoption is sustained by routine and reinforcement. Without structure, it’s easy for teams to revert back to old habits. We know the importance of establishing support for ongoing adoption–not just at setup. If you are responsible for reporting on strategic priorities, or aligning performance measures to those priorities, this section is for you.
When we share progress it creates a culture of transparency and trust.
That’s where reporting and public dashboards come in. Programs require funding, and programs that prove success are 20% more likely to get future funding. It’s now more important than ever to prioritize programs that support strategic priorities, allocate funding to those programs, and track and measure their success.
We understand teams won’t want to engage in any software change if it adds extra work. That’s why, in Envisio, progress updates flow right through to dashboards and reports. One update, multiple outputs. You can create reports using our best-practice templates and schedule to auto-generate them and send them to recipients monthly, quarterly or on a custom schedule.
Dashboards can be configured for public, council or internal views with minimal setup (no IT required!) and allow the viewer self-service plan progress and insights using the drill-down functionality.
Adoption is more than logging in—it’s about creating momentum, clarity, trust, and long-term confidence.
When it comes to creating a culture of performance management, it goes so much deeper than just choosing software–it’s about picking the right partner. One who takes the time to look under the hood, understand where you are at, and act as your trusted advisor in building an achievable plan. It’s the old saying “Teamwork makes the dream work”. We’ll work hand-in-hand with you to build a solid cultural foundation and a plan to get you where you want to go.
“There is more trust now, and there has been more of a common focus among departments. The breakdown of silos has really created a sense of teamwork and camaraderie. Using Envisio has also helped with onboarding. We use the software to show new staff the strategic plan and help them understand how their actions contribute to the city’s strategic goals.”
– Lois Knutson, Administrative Services and Performance Measurement Coordinator, Maplewood, MN
We’ve built Envisio to support teams like yours. If you’re curious about our consulting services and how our coaches can support your team, connect with us here.
↓ Check out our guides and request a demo!
Want to learn more from Envisio about how to put your plans into action and drive better community outcomes? Check out these resources:
- Guide: Operational Planning for Local Governments
- Guide: How to Develop a Local Government Reporting Framework
- Guide: How to Develop Local Government Performance Measures
You can also request a demo, and let us show you around!
Amy Ward
Amy has spent ten years working in marketing with a focus on product marketing. Amy sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, customer success and the product team to help bring new features and products to market. She loves being active and exploring the outdoors (especially with her family), continuously learning and connecting with people on a deeper level. Amy is happy to be working with Envisio— a purpose-driven company that is making an impact on our future.
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