Listen to Mayor Walsh articulate his vision for the City, and you will hear him describe his goal to transform Syracuse into a more data-driven city. But that process is not something that just happens on its own; it takes work and a data-driven culture needs to be nurtured. When the Federal Government passed the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) to provide funding to state and local governments around the United States in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Syracuse received $123 million and the Mayor saw this as an opportunity to foster and promote better data practices throughout the City.
The process started in July of 2021 when the Mayor established the ARPA governance group to ensure the City would be able to manage and implement the ARPA funding with a data-driven framework. As the City’s data department, API joined with representatives from the Finance, Budget, Communications, and various other City departments for this initial planning process. The Federal Government’s guidelines have become more defined over time, but from the beginning, the reporting standards were much more stringent for metropolitan areas with populations over two-hundred-fifty thousand residents. Although the City was not expected to reach those same standards, ARPA was seen as an opportunity to instill better data practices throughout the City from an early stage.
While many departments throughout the City have developed their own project management approaches and data tracking strategies, one of the motivations for having a centralized group with oversight over the various ARPA projects was the establishment of an organization-wide standard for all departments across the City. Such a standard would promote better organizational efficiency and allow for better cooperation between departments. With this goal in mind, there are several strategies that have been adopted.
Project Sheets
Whenever a project is approved, a standardized project initiation sheet must be filled out and submitted for review by members of the ARPA governance group. The project sheet requires the project manager and owners to clearly define the project, layout its purpose and justification, identify expected milestones, outputs, outcomes, provide a timeline, estimate a line-item budget, and answer various additional questions.
Project sheets go through a review process with the ARPA team where the project manager and owner must explain and justify the items and decisions. Sometimes these meetings are straightforward, but other times, they can press the project team to modify or reevaluate their proposal. The intention is not to create an extra bureaucratic hurdle for each project, but rather to ensure all projects are held to the same high standards.
One of the goals is to confirm the projects have clearly defined objectives, but also ensure they can deliver on the promised milestones, outputs, and outcomes. This process also establishes that the project teams have the infrastructure in place to carry out the project, meet reporting guidelines, and collect the data of interest to the ARPA team.
Project Management Meetings and Centralized Data Tracking.
While it is impossible to avoid every delay or anticipate every obstacle, in an effort to help projects stay on track and adhere to the goals and milestones that are established in the project initiation sheet, once a project is underway, periodic project status meetings are held and a project status report is maintained for each project. This keeps the ARPA team and the City apprised of the progress of every project and aware of any blockers or delays.
Similar to the project initiation sheet, the project status sheet follows several project management standards. The project status sheet identifies major milestones, timelines, and any blockers that arise. The sheet identifies the project status using a green, yellow, red scale, where green denotes a project that is on track with no major issues, yellow projects are at risk, and red identifies a project that cannot meet its targets. The project status sheet also identifies the project capacity and whether resources are committed or not.
In addition to helping ensure projects stay on track, the project status sheet is intended to foster a culture within the city that approaches every project from a project management perspective. Throughout the process of every project, every milestone is evaluated on a set schedule, and the team identifies if a project is on track to reach its goals or, if not, what needs to be done to get it back on track. Additionally, the project status sheet is a standardized method to track the project’s budget status and key performance metrics.
Evidence-Based Analysis.
Combating the negative economic effects of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is the primary intention of the ARPA program, but the Federal Government also intended to promote data modernization efforts around the country with this funding. Within the City, there has been a push to do more evidence-based analysis and the API team is heavily involved in identifying which projects are best suited for data analyses and in-depth research.
During the project initiation phase, discussions are held with the ARPA team and the project owners and managers to determine whether a project warrants an in-depth data analysis project and if the outputs and findings produced by such an analysis will be meaningful to the city. Once a project has been identified, data expectations are established before a project starts. This is especially important when working with contractors and sub-award recipients so that data requirements can be clearly communicated and written into contracts. Data analysis and analytics can take the form of developing dashboards to track key performance metrics or in-depth regression analysis to better understand the impacts of the ARPA money and ARPA-funded programs on outcomes of interest.
Public-facing dashboard.
One of the biggest challenges put before the API team was devising a data-driven reporting strategy for how the City was managing its ARPA funds. The API team began exploring the work done by other cities and localities to identify some of the best practices, and inspired by cities like Baltimore, Boston, and Denver decided on a data dashboard as the central pillar of our public reporting approach.
The top page of the ARPA Dashboard provides a high-level overview of how the city is managing the ARPA funding. Visitors can learn about the overall status of projects as well as information on how much money has been budgeted and spent. The overview also provides a more detailed breakdown by priority areas.
The Mayor defined four priority areas to focus the ARPA funding which are aligned with the Federal Government’s four separate eligible use categories towards which ARPA funds could be allocated. These areas are Investing in Jobs and Economic Recovery, Funding for Children, Families, and Neighborhoods, Funding for Enhancing Government Response and Resilience, and Funding for Transforming Infrastructure and Public Spaces. The ARPA Dashboard further provides detailed breakdowns based on these subject areas. Visitors can use these sections to learn about project progress, spending in regards to these areas, and even what outputs are planned and completed for each project.
Transforming the City’s data culture was never going to be a quick process. And although the ARPA project is an enormous undertaking on its own, coupling it with the City’s broader data goals has accelerated the transformation. The API team has played a crucial role in this process and looks forward to continuing to work with the larger ARPA team and the City’s various departments and project stakeholders to continue to improve the City’s data practices for the duration of the ARPA project and beyond.