Collaboration and the City of Scottsdale's High Performance and Innovation Team.

• Author: Ludwig, Katie
• Position: FINANCE

The City of Scottsdale's High Performance and Innovation initiative is an organizationwide effort to measure, analyze, improve, and report on the services provided by the city. The team that works on this effort is made up of leaders throughout the organization, and they believe that collaboration has been the key to its success.

Shane Stone is a management associate in the city manager's office and leads the Central High Performance and Innovation Team (H-PIT or Central Team). "My biggest task and the biggest task of the Central Team is simply to empower the four teams, soon to be five teams," he said.

Shane explained that there are currently four H-PIT partner teams: the Data Analytics Team, the Process Improvement Team, the Benchmarking and Quarterly Performance Report (QPR) Team, and the Behavioral Insights Team Scottsdale (BITS). The city is developing a fifth team that will be focused on developing new initiatives and programs that provide innovative solutions to existing problems.

"We have tremendous work happening, and the role of the Central Team is to bring those teams together, to collaborate, to understand what we're all doing and find ways that we can help and support each other," he added.

Approximately 35 people are engaged with the Central Team. All the partner team leads serve on the Central Team, and some serve on a couple of partner teams. Shane said he expects the number of people involved to rise to about 40 after the fifth team is up and running.

Another important role of the Central Team is to promote the work of each of the sub-teams, showcasing their work to the rest of the organization as well as externally to other cities, primarily through their work to achieve silver-level certification through What Works Cities.

"This initiative is so much more than numbers and evidence-based decisionmaking and performance measures that come out at the end. This is much more about teamwork, collaboration, and innovation, faith, and bravery to do things differently," said Cindi Eberhardt, team lead for BITS. Like all the team leads, Cindi's work on H-PIT is in addition to her "day job" as the strategic initiatives program manager for Planning, Economic Development, and Tourism. During the pandemic, she has also been serving as the administrative lead for the recovery efforts as part of the city's response to the pandemic.

Cindi was first exposed to the city's performance management efforts back in 2009, when she was volunteering with the city's Citizen Budget Review Commission. The commission was looking at performance measures and noticed that the city's goals, objectives, and performance measures didn't really match up with what the departments were working on. Brent Stockwell, the assistant city manager, championed the effort to address this mismatch. Brent's goal was to bring together a team of folks to develop reasonable performance objectives and goals and then tie them back to the actual work being performed in the city, Cindi explains. He believed that rather than being 100 percent of one person's job, the effort would be more successful if it was a portion of the job for many people.

BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS

The work of BITS grew out of the city's partnership with What Works Cities and a private firm called The Behavioural Insights Team, which helps organizations make better use of behavioral science in their decisionmaking and program design (and was the inspiration for the team's name).

"What we do is apply behavioral science techniques--easy messaging and nudges--to address a pain point in a program or service that ultimately has a positive impact on the lives of our citizens," she explained. "That's the reason we do it. The result is that we want to make sure we're helping our client departments actually serve the community better by making that connection and relieving that pain point."

BITS sometimes uses randomized control trials to test approaches to relieving a given pain point, comparing outcomes for a control group that receives the traditional government response to outcomes for another group that receives a treated response. "We've had a lot of ah-ha moments, a lot of times when we thought we intuitively knew what the results would be, and results that surprised us. And we've learned along the way," Cindi said.

BITS also works to make sure that the lessons they've learned inform the way the city communicates, particularly during the pandemic, when both employees and the public have been inundated with information. She explained that BITS has focused on using behavioral insights to simplify messages both internally and externally.

BITS has learned that creating subteams to work on different projects works well. "We've learned that it's really difficult when you have 14 people in a room that all sit there and talk about a trial. So, as we've evolved, when we identify a project that we want to work on, we'll create sub-teams and then have a leader work on carrying that through to the end, and then present the results to the team as a whole," Cindi said. Her sub-team leaders have told her that they appreciate the opportunity to gain experience leading a project. She believes these opportunities for employees to enhance their leadership and professional skills have played a role in the overall success of the city's H-PIT initiative by encouraging more employees to get involved.

Another key to the city's success is ensuring that all city employees are aware of the H-PIT initiative and understand why the city has invested in the initiative. When an...