One of the best parts about working in the public sector is that we rarely face problems alone. Municipal governments face related or similar issues, and sharing information is much more common than in the private sector as communities generally are not trying to patent their approach to pavement prioritization, procurement, or data governance. It is relatively easy to send an email or make a call to ask another city how they dealt with a particular challenge, then apply that knowledge to issues facing Syracuse. Not every day, however, is it possible to meet in-person and deep-dive into a set of shared issues.
Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to do just that: we hosted the Innovation & Technology team from South Bend, Indiana for a knowledge exchange session covering data management, open data, performance management, and various other topics. Simply put, we learned a lot from what they shared – starting with the elegance of their team’s motto “listen first, build with.”
~~~
This visit was a long time coming, first proposed years ago when the head of our office met the head of South Bend’s team in a municipal government webinar. Over time they discovered that Syracuse and South Bend are of similar sizes, faced by common challenges, and have a strong commitment to public sector innovation. With each team having recently gone through an internal restructuring, it was the perfect time to discuss each team’s approach to items on their growing portfolio.
The similarity between our cities was clear from the get-go. South Bend was a year or two ahead of Syracuse in some projects while Syracuse was a year or two ahead of South Bend in others. The South Bend team shared insights on project management and change management, as well as their experience implementing and using Enterprise GIS for asset management. Meanwhile, the Syracuse team shared about our data management platform and processes, our efforts to curate high-quality datasets for public use, and our work optimizing Syracuse’s Open Data Portal so that city residents can access and utilize this data. The two teams delivered a combined presentation about how performance management is conducted. Below is a sample of what we learned from South Bend and what we got to share.
Project Management in Local Government Innovation
South Bend I&T’s Operations Manager gave us an inside look at her project management process. Practicing thorough documentation and avoiding scope creep figured prominently. She stressed that effective project management is less about becoming an expert on the subject matter and more about tapping and coordinating the expertise of team members. She also highlighted the value of starting with the end in mind and working backward from there. But instead of merely aiming to ‘finish’ the project, she recommended thinking carefully about what it would make the project a success and building the project plan around that vision.
Another point of emphasis was the need to integrate emotional intelligence and social awareness. Being attentive to personal stress and addressing it early can prevent major headaches down the road, as can proactively communicating with the project team if team members perceive that something is going wrong. Lastly, because different departments in city government tend to have distinct internal cultures, communication preferences, and organization, it pays to find a “buddy” within the department who can help bridge these differences and encourage adoption of the final project.
Her points resonated with our team, which has dedicated project leaders, an extensive portfolio of new and ongoing projects, and several other team members who perform aspects of project management in their work. Acting as internal consultants to the City of Syracuse, the bulk of our projects are inherently interdepartmental, making their success largely dependent upon the quality of relationships we build with the ‘client’ departments. South Bend I&T’s approach perfectly parallels our project management values and is directly applicable to our work.
Syracuse’s Investments into Data and Performance
Our team was asked to share our approaches to data infrastructure, management, and sharing.
Like many cities, the push to integrate data into decision-making has raised numerous concerns and challenges in Syracuse. Data can be messy, uncollated, and context unaware. It is often siloed and difficult to access in real-time. And data sharing is not a simple process that can exist without rules and guard rails. Our colleagues in South Bend were interested to know how we use our data platform to address some of these challenges.
Have you ever tried to print a file, only to walk to the printer and not find your file? Clearly something must have gone wrong, so you return to your computer and tell it to print the file again, and then a third time, and then a fourth time, and before long the printer crashes.
Now imagine it is not a printer, but a database. Currently, data analysts often directly access production databases, perform transformations and merges, and export the data in the needed format. All these tasks may cause slowdowns or more substantial harm to the database or operations.
Syracuse invested in a data platform that allows analysts to access and analyze data without running these risks. It ensures that all analysts are working off the same version of the data, while also reducing the possibility that an analyst might unintentionally delete or alter data. Additionally, as the City expands its data governance efforts, the data platform enables us to regulate data access and create classification levels.
Investing in our data platform and processes has yielded a host of operational benefits. The data platform makes it possible to ingest, analyze, and report on data from a variety of sources in order to keep the Mayor and Department Heads apprised of key performance metrics. Data submitted by residents helped the City better understand and address the illegal setout problem, improve sanitation practices, and quantify the value of the recent sanitation overhaul. The City now can also more easily receive data from community partners to ascertain the impact of investments in the community and to track the performance of programs funded through the ARPA program.
One of our more recent tasks has been using the data platform to help solve some of the challenges that arise when working with addressing data. The City has collected and used addressing data across a myriad of departments since long before our office even existed. These different sources of address data, many of which started as paper records, can cause problems – especially when departments go to collaborate on a project. The City’s data platform improves cross-departmental work by bringing these disparate data sources together, building schema and rules for managing data from different sources, and establishing a source of truth.
These are just some of the ways that the City’s investment into a central data platform has translated to improved performance in operations smoother collaborations between departments.
~~~
Syracuse prides itself on the investments we have made in data and data driven decision-making, but there are always ways to learn and do more. Connecting with our friends in South Bend gave us the ability to see how other communities value data and to learn valuable lessons on how we can continue to leverage data to improve services and serve residents. Similarly, we can learn from their project management approach to not only increase the chances that projects are successful, but to ensure they work for the people they are intended to help.
We are grateful for South Bend’s visit and look forward to connecting with them more in the future.