Town of Prosper, TX

Prosper, Texas drives innovation and sound governance with strategy execution

A short distance north of Dallas, officials in the fast-growing Town of Prosper, Texas, are working hard to ensure that nothing about Prosper is a misnomer.

“We’re experiencing huge growth right now, which is exciting to see,” says Robyn Battle, the Executive Director of Community Services at Prosper. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s really fun to see the town develop. With that comes challenges, though – we have a lot of projects running and a lot of infrastructure and efforts that accompany rapid growth. We need new roads and new water lines, new parks, fire stations and other facilities.

Maintaining the fabric of what makes Prosper special during this period of expansion is really important to both Robyn and the rest of the employees at the town.

“I think what’s unique about Prosper is the residents’ view of the town,” she says. “People move here because they want the small-town feel. They want to know their neighbors. They want to be connected within the community, and I think that is something that we at the town do really well – building relationships with different segments of the community to make sure that we’re all in this together and that people feel connected to their local government.”

Robyn and her team have been using Envisio to help them manage their growth while ensuring they maintain communications and build trust with their residents.

Let’s take a look at how they’re doing it.

Strategic planning is an annual affair with some outside help

The population of Prosper has almost tripled in the past decade, and even before onboarding Envisio, the town had been progressive in their use of strategic planning to best manage this growth.

“Ever since I joined the town, and even before that, the council has always held an annual strategic planning process,” says Robyn. “They bring in a facilitator, and have a day-long process where we talk about what we’ve accomplished in the past year. After that, we then set some goals and some objectives for the coming year or, in some instances, the next five years. After that, the town manager uses that work plan to get all of those objectives done in the designated time period. Then, the next year, we come back and do the same thing, and refine those goals and objectives.”

Prosper structures their strategic plan around five key pillars that drive everything they strive to achieve on an annual basis.

“We have five high-level goals,” says Robyn, “and then all of our action items are built off of those goals. They cover things like quality infrastructure and high-quality residential development, business attraction, and business investment. Our downtown is a big deal. The Council is really focused on our downtown area, revitalizing it, redeveloping it…and providing exceptional service to the residents in Prosper. That’s something that permeates throughout the whole organization–no matter what we do, we provide exceptional service to our residents and then everything – all of the action items and the deliverables – are tied to these goals.”

“We’ve used several different facilitators along the way. All of them have had a different style and a different process. We have found that the council responds well when we change up the facilitator every once in a while. We like to keep it fresh. And then two years ago, our facilitator introduced me to Envisio. I went and watched a demonstration at another city, and I really liked the way that Envisio captured all of the objectives that the city was trying to accomplish along with timelines and status updates—all of those really valuable metrics. It mirrored the process that we were already undertaking.”

Battling a spreadsheet makes managing a plan cumbersome

Prior to using Envisio, Robyn and her team had been managing their goals and associated strategic activities in a spreadsheet—a task they found inefficient, time-consuming, and difficult to facilitate.

“We had a spreadsheet and we used the colors red, yellow and green to show whether a project or action was late or at risk, on track or complete. So I thought, “Well, okay. We’re already doing this on a spreadsheet and it’s a pain because you have to put the document out there and have all of the directors manually enter their updates. It was just very cumbersome, and it made aligning things and maintaining an update schedule difficult.”

Using a spreadsheet to track their strategic plan had other drawbacks as well, Robyn says–namely, it made it difficult to measure progress on larger initiatives that had many phases, steps, and actions items. Onboarding Envisio, which her and her team did over a year ago, has helped immensely in this arena.

“As far as tracking the status of projects, especially those that are kind of long term, it was like, well, how do you do that?” she says. “Sure, it’s on track, but for a complex project that has multiple steps or components, we didn’t really have an effective way to capture projects like that. Envisio solved a lot of those problems, because not only do you now have the action items that tie to the strategic plan, but you have the individual milestones as well. All the different steps that have to happen in that action item for it to be completed on time are represented, and all of those have timelines.”

Envisio, which Robyn and her team settled on after a thorough procurement process, was an easy software to roll out, she says. The platform has been a driving force in streamlining their strategic initiatives and for ushering in a new culture of accountability and transparency at Prosper.

“We’re very, very happy with Envisio,” she says. “I think it works really well. Everyone’s on board with the process, and Envisio walks you through the updates. It has definitely caused our staff to be a little more accountable on their work plans, because we do our updates monthly. At first, it was a little bit difficult getting the staff on board. They were like, “What is this? What are you making me do?” But, as with any new process, you just have to manage that change, explain why it’s important, and explain how it’s not only going to benefit the town, but it’s going to benefit them. Now our updates run with very few problems. And it’s a lot easier than the spreadsheet!”

Increased transparency, both internal and external, is possible through reporting

Robyn and her team have found that increased transparency and accountability has paid dividends with both the town council and the residents of Prosper. Using the platform’s public dashboard feature, and publishing regular updates to it, has put the impressive work the town is doing front and center for key stakeholders–both internal and external.

“Well, that’s just it,” Robyn says. “Prior to Envisio, it wasn’t that we didn’t share the strategic plan, but it wasn’t out front like it is now. With the public dashboard, it’s so easy to just put that on the website and show it to the public. And it’s so easy to read! Before the dashboard, we had the strategic plan available, but there wasn’t a whole lot of interest from the public and there wasn’t a lot of buzz about the strategic plan. After all, who wants to read a 50-page document about our strategic plan? That’s just not very interesting.”

Robyn and her team have found that while the public-facing dashboard functionality of Envisio has been useful in keeping the public informed, it is the internal reporting feature which has helped to greatly improve communication between the town’s administrators and its elected officials.

“I use the reporting feature every month, and I use it a few different ways,” she says. “Firstly, I use it for myself, and I have a report that tells me which updates are due. And secondly, I’ve got a report scheduled to send out to the staff. So, they get their notification email about what’s due by a certain date. I also have a report that tells me which staff members have not entered their updates yet. I can then send them a quick little email to remind them that they have updates due.”

“I also run a report for the town manager once a month so that he can see everyone’s updates. This way, he can provide the town council with updates for all five of our goals. He’ll do a quick summary of where we are on the action items, which ones we completed or made significant progress on during that previous month, and then he’ll write that into a goal update summary for the month. These summaries can also capture progress on specific items, whether they are complete or on-track, and he’ll often pick one or two highlights from the previous month.”

“Historically, our council has always gotten mid-month reports,” says Robyn. “They’ve always received monthly department updates. A police report, a fire report, that kind of thing. Since we added Envisio, they get a strategic planning report once a month as well.”

Tying budget to strategy ensures progress

To ensure that their strategic plan remains the guiding force behind their work, Robyn and the team at Prosper have begun to use Envisio in concert with their budgeting software.

“Where we have seen some big improvement is the link between the strategic plan and the budget,” says Robyn. “A lot of the time, you go through this strategic planning process and the council identifies their priorities, and it gets put in this nice little document, and it gets saved on a computer or put on a shelf, and it doesn’t really get looked at again. Or, we have our spreadsheet and we’re working the spreadsheet, but are we really tying the action items there on our strategic plan to what gets funded in the budget? Because if it’s on the strategic plan, that should be the first thing that gets funded.”

Aligning budget with strategy is a key tenet of operational planning, and Robyn and her team are leading the pack when it comes to gaining leadership buy-in, and subsequently funding, for their goals.

“I feel like now we’re really starting to communicate with the council that the priorities set in the strategic planning process are critical because they are not only going to drive what staff spends their time and effort on in the next year, but they are also a major driver of the budget. So, I think we’re starting to really make that connection more than ever before.”

Robyn and her team rely on both Envisio and a separate budgeting software to identify where funds will line up with strategy.

“Once we started using Envisio, we began to think about how to tie the budget to the strategic plan,” she says. “So, if a staff member is going to write a request for new funds in the budget, they have to tie it to one or more of the strategic goals. So, when they’re typing out their justification for that decision package, there is a separate section of the request that they must fill out, and they have to explain how this ties back to one or more goals of the strategic plan. And I think that helps us prioritize because if you can’t tie a request back to one of the strategic goals, how important is it? Or, at least the requests that tie back to a specific goal are probably going to get prioritized over those that are not.”

On a more technical level, Prosper is using the milestone function in Envisio to directly link their action items to the budgeting process.

“We created milestones that are tied to the budget,” Robyn says. “If there’s something that we know is coming up in the next year that staff is going to propose as an objective and that council is going to have to approve, then there’s a milestone in Envisio for it. So, we might be able to issue the RFP or evaluate that. But if that doesn’t get funded in the budget, it stops there. So, it’s something that helps us track where we allocate our resources. This way, if something doesn’t get funded and doesn’t get done, we can explain that to the town council.”

Prosper plans to continue their growth alongside their new roadmap

Moving forward, Robyn and her team plan to use Envisio to help guide Prosper towards, well… prospering!

“We have a process in place now that everybody understands, and it is just so much more efficient,” she says. “Everybody’s using the same process, and I can easily create a report for the town manager that provides, at a glance, an overview of what’s happening with our strategic plan. The communication between our council and town management has increased greatly, and I think we’re much more efficient because of it. The easy-to-read monthly reports for council are huge, too!”

And while Robyn is happy with the way the city council and the team have embraced Envisio, she knows there’s still some work to do. At a high-level, she’s still working to change the culture of the town so that everyone, from directors to staff to residents, embrace their new culture of accountability.

“I think we just need to get better at it,” she says. “It needs to be fully embedded in the culture of our organization. We’re doing so well with these monthly updates, but I still feel like it’s something that we’re just getting used to. We want to start using Envisio to guide conversations and questions about how we’re executing on our goals.”

Cultural shifts inside an organization take time, and you need to have a good process in place before you automate it, says Robyn.

“Automating a bad process doesn’t serve you, you just repeat the same mistakes over and over. Make sure you have a good process before you automate it, and that you have buy-in from the top of your organization. You need to have everyone on board with a transition like this, and you need to have a champion who is willing to train people, to help people, to make it successful, and to be the cheerleader, because it is about managing change. With something like Envisio, you have to be able to communicate the value of it. And it really does bring value.”

Robyn is also aware that using Envisio can help employees understand how their day-to-day work contributes to the town’s success.

“I do think it is important for every staff member to understand how what they do on a day-to-day basis feeds into the strategic plan,” she says. “It contributes to our ability to provide great service, or improve our infrastructure, or whatever the next goal is. It really matters.”