Longtime Envisionary Broward County develops new five-year strategic plan to continue with innovative and high-performing history

Broward County Florida is the 17th largest county in the United States. Their size, along with their international airport, seaport, and Visitors’ & Convention Bureau, make the responsible administration of their government a sizable and important task. Fortunately, the team at Broward is up to the challenge. 

A longtime Envisio customer, Broward County has already worked through one five-year strategic plan with the software behind them–however, a fresh commitment to strategic execution is pushing their success to new heights. 

“In terms of a strategic plan and our use of Envisio,” says Brian Flanagan, Head of Learning & Organizational Development at Broward County, “the County first created a five-year strategic plan in 2016. The way a strategic plan is typically developed in local government is to start with the elected Board of County Commissioners. These elected officials have constituents who they are accountable to. Their priorities become our priorities. Once created, executive sponsorship rests with our County Administrator and her executive team.” 

Broward’s new strategic plan runs from 2023-2028, but developing it wasn’t an easy task, especially in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their first strategic plan, dated 2016-2020, was set to be refreshed prior to the onset of the pandemic. 

“During COVID, issues of public safety and economic concerns were prioritized” says Brian. “Creating a new strategic plan was lower on the priority list, not to mention the challenges of convening in person to develop the plan. This turned out to be a good thing from the perspective of our strategic plan. It gave us a bit of a cooling off period. What we did in March of 2022 was hit reset and develop a new five-year strategic plan for 2023-2028.”

Shared values lay the foundations

Working with the Commissioners to develop a strategic plan that reflected the values of the community required a few different exercises, most importantly mapping those priorities against strategic goals that were achievable within the respective timeframe. 

“We worked with the Commissioners to validate their ‘values’ as articulated in the first five-year plan and transform them into goals for the plan,” says Brian. “After our first retreat, we met with the County Administrator and her executive team three additional times to refine our Mission Statement, identify our Core Values, and finalize Strategic Plan Actions. Once we had the Commissioners’ support, we mapped their 2023 priorities against the strategic plan goal themes to validate that their top priorities, whether they are long-standing or new, are reflected in the plan.”

Let’s take a look at what is important to Broward County’s constituents, County Commissioners, and administrators through some of the internal materials that they’ve developed to keep their Mission, Vision, and Values top of mind for staff and the community they serve. “What was interesting about this process,” says Brian, “was that a lot of the content of the last plan was still relevant. A lot of the  priorities were consistent.”

What a visual! The team at Broward have done an exceptional job crafting a cascading strategic plan rooted in the priorities of their community. Their Mission, Vision, and Values clearly inform their Goal Themes, which ultimately make up the top level of their Plan in Envisio. 

“We have five Goal Themes. Underneath those are the S.M.A.R.T. actions. We were able to work with the County Commissioners and realize that the content of the old plan was good, it was the monitoring and follow-up that was inconsistent. So, we realigned with our leaders, and we came up with nine goals. Then we did the work across the organization to build priority S.M.A.R.T. actions. Envisio gave us a platform to work from in developing the smart actions and training people on them. We basically built a new Strategic Plan for the next five years this way.”

Five pillars support an expansive, impressive strategic plan

The Broward County team worked avidly, both internally and with partners like Envisio, to ensure that their plan was not only strategic, but actionable–that residents of the County and employees at all levels of the organization could see how their work was moving the strategic agenda forward. 

“In March of 2022, during our annual Board of County Commissioners Retreat we laid the foundation” says Brian. “We knew what we wanted to achieve in that first year and we did two very specific things to head in that direction. First, department directors summarized their biggest, or key, successes out of the last strategic plan because we wanted an element of celebration. Another goal was to bring completed projects to a close. I know from speaking with Rob, our Customer Success Manager at Envisio, that celebrating successes is a key element to keeping people engaged in your strategy. Second, the directors talked about strategically, over the next five years, what are the big things that they see happening?” 

The result was a transformative roadmap that clearly translates the Vision, Mission, and Values into the five themes detailed below. “The way we talk about it,” says Brian, “we always start with the Vision, Mission, and Values. But the five Goal Themes that flow from them, that’s where the strategy sits and where the actions are. Our five Goal Themes are Accountable Government, Economic Opportunity, Connected Community, Resilient Community, and Healthy Community.”

Accountable Government is where we are committed to providing an open government that is transparent and accessible to the public.  Consistently delivering responsive, efficient, inclusive and equitable quality services to the public and internal customers while providing a safe community to live, learn, work and play.

Economic Opportunity is just that. Ensuring economic opportunities and a sustainable economy, with an emphasis on Broward’s lower and middle class.  Ensuring residents have an affordable place to live by offering sustainable, compatible, innovative, and accessible, affordable housing options for all income levels, including integrated, permanent supportive housing and zoning that helps residents build equity.

Connected Community addresses two key areas. Prominently marketing Broward County as a brand, while increasing public understanding of programs and services. Further, it involves cooperatively delivering an efficient and accessible regional intermodal transportation network.

Resilient Community is about ensuring accessible, seamlessly integrated investments in renewable energy, sustainable practices, manufacturing, resilient infrastructure, and environmental protection. 

Healthy Community has a lot to do with delivering accessible human services that holistically address the whole person collaboratively and compassionately. It also involves cultivating community culture, arts, recreation and life-long learning.

Beyond crafting a comprehensive and community-oriented strategic plan, there was another consideration when developing these pillars–they are easy to remember, engage with, and understand how work contributes to them. 

Success comes easier the second time around 

Brian and his team will be the first to admit that there were a few challenges in the way they managed their prior strategic plan–but for them, those learnings were simply the first step towards greater success the second time around. 

With both the Broward County and Envisio teams aligned on this second iteration of their strategic partnership, they went about building the new Plan into the platform and, perhaps more importantly, using best practices around how to make a strategic plan a living document. 

“Envisio started with us in 2016, and we really learned a lot from that first effort,” says Brian.  “When we built the second Strategic Plan, we kept it manageable. We have 70-plus lines of business, 17 agencies, and four offices. It’s huge, but we requested that, for the County Plan, departments submit only their top, most strategic actions. Rob was instrumental in helping us adopt this mindset of is our strategic plan operational. It’s not the ongoing business we do every day to keep the buses running or keep the parks open–it is really those strategic projects that have a clear deliverable, start date and an end date that move us closer to achieving our community goals.” 

Broward County finds a partner in strategic success with Envisio

The strategic partnership between Broward and Envisio began as a standard procurement process–a potential client in need of a technology partner to manage an increasing demand for strategic alignment across a large government organization. Over the past eight years, the relationship has evolved into a much broader engagement involving knowledge sharing, best practices downloads, resource development, and a host of other bilateral idea flows that have really solidified the idea that Envisio is a partner, not just a provider.  

“We’ve shifted from seeing Envisio as a software application that we paid a subscription to, to a strategic consulting partner,” says Brian.

“Recognizing that it’s a strategic partnership, that it’s consulting and advising. We leveraged a lot of the knowledge that Envisio shares around how to create a good plan; how to create a living plan. Even though there are similarities between a traditional strategic plan and Envisio’s software, we aligned the structure a little more closely with Envisio’s architecture and language. On our side, we recognized that success means change management: creating awareness, desire, knowledge and results. Leadership from the top, building in accountability, branding, and recognition. It’s all those things.” 

This partnership approach has helped Broward County level up their use of Envisio to all-star levels. 

“We have more control and more diligence around the data that goes in. We’ve activated the monthly reminder notifications to ensure people do their updates, which is not something we did in the first iteration of our Strategic Plan,” he says. “We also have someone behind the scenes who is there to monitor and quality check the updates. A system administrator, an internal champion and expert. They’re in constant dialogue with Rob. We also follow up if an update is missing.  When I provide a report on the percentage completion, or I go into detail with our commissioners, we now have confidence that what’s in the system is accurate and current. We’ve created that awareness, the accountability, the urgency around timely updates.” 

Leveraging Envisio’s engagement tools, like notifications, as well as expanding their use of the platform’s reporting functionality, further demonstrates how Broward is seizing the opportunity for strategic success.

“We’ve embraced the reporting features much more than we did previously,” says Brian. “In fact, we’ve had instances where we’ve gone back to ask Envisio about something the system couldn’t do, and those requests have been taken seriously and some of those features have found their way into the product.” 

“For what it’s worth, the system is very intuitive. We’ve got users across the organization who are incredibly tech-savvy as well as those who are not tech-savvy at all, and they’re all managing it.

“I do think one of the things that Envisio does very well is to be intentional with what access someone does or doesn’t have. If I’ve got three actions assigned to me, I have access to those three actions when I log in and that’s it. You aren’t digging around or looking all over the place–you know exactly what you must do.”

Resources and knowledge sharing are drivers of progress

At Envisio, there are a few things we champion more than resource development and knowledge sharing–we believe that engagement, training, and feedback opportunities accelerate excellence for all. Success is so much easier when everyone is rowing in the same direction! We love seeing a customer get creative with their resources, and Broward has done an amazing job of developing content, resources, a dashboard, and even calendars to keep their strategic plan front of mind for staff, administrators, and their constituents. 

“Something exciting that we did this time around was to focus on developing the brand and enhancing communication,” says Brian. “The strategy has a creative look and feel, the Goal Themes have logos. It’s on our intranet site. Our public facing dashboard has gone live, it’s on our website. We have a quarterly county administrator award that is built around the five themes, and whoever gets that award did something extraordinary aligned with the five Goal Themes. We’ve even got it summarized in a poster! We also created tabletop cards that tell the story of the Strategic Plan. We put them in training rooms or executive team meetings. We just built a calendar and every month it features one of the Goal Themes or one of the Values, and it has an action for people to do related to that.”

Outside of their offices, Broward has done an exceptional job of turning their public dashboard into a valuable repository of information for their community. It’s been a hit with both staff and their constituents, says Brian. 

“We’re learning about actionable items in the Envisio operational planning workshop–part of the Envisio Academy success series. We just learned that to keep a plan alive, to keep it relevant, allowing adjustments once a year is best practice. When we heard that, the light bulb turned on. Now what we’re going to do every September is to provide a window for updates on dates and specifics. We can add new actions, adjust deliverables or deadlines and we can retire something older if it’s completed. We have governance around what goes into the plan and how it needs to be approved. And for the next fiscal year, our budget office is requiring that budget requests will be tied to the Strategic Plan as well. This is something that we’ve learned from Envisio, and something that we adopted.”