 All right, I'll kick it off. Hold on. I was checking to check it off. David likes a good prop Needs a good steam or iron, but otherwise we'll let it pass So we're gonna talk about the Fort Worth lab and I get to kick it off I've had a goal for a number of years That envisions a group of employees working at a corporate level that combines data analytics and Budgeting or how we allocate our scarce resources and public policy analysis all with the idea of answering the question for you city council and our Citizens in our community How are we making Fort Worth a better place? In our organization, we have a large number of plans. We collect a lot of data We have a large operating and capital budget And we measure a lot of activities. I Think there is magic though when you combine all of that and Then have a bunch of curious people that ask public policy questions like Has the increase in spending in street lights and pavement markings made Fort Worth a safer place and has traffic and pedestrian accidents gone down Or we've added a number of civilian response positions in police to handle Lower priority activity How is that? improve the availability of time for patrol officers or How can we improve the 911 system from the time the caller calls us to the time the responses by their side? And it is also about looking into the future like how will artificial intelligence drones robotics Effects service delivery and how we deliver services in the city of Fort Worth in The past we've had a department It was been named budget management budget and research performance and budget and most recently planning and data analytics I asked mark McGann mark McDaniel look at where we are Look at where we need to be and then tell us how we're going to get there So we're making the recommendation of and we're calling it Fort Worth lab and Mark's going to describe what that means. I Think it's a great visual though Right. It is about Exploration, it's about learning. It's about analysis. It's about cause and effect And most importantly, it's about making Fort Worth a better place Not only today, but tomorrow next week next year Next decade and the generation that follows So this is our idea of how do we take all of what we already produce which is plans data measurements and And turn it into useful information for you our city council and our community mark Dr. Mark take it away. Thank you. Dr. Cook So Good afternoon mayor and council It's a pleasure to be in front of you after three months being here And talking to a lot of folks here on the ground in Fort Worth and also talking to a lot of my colleagues around the nation that are part of the my network and my previous life And a lot of the different associations that have also helped to contribute to this and you'll see that as we proceed through the slides Mark apologies to interrupt you, but I'd like for you to introduce for those watching and those Maybe that know who you are and your background and why you're so critical for this role Oh, thank you. David somehow suckered you into it Thank you, mayor. So mark mcdaniel Been in city management for 35 years Managed cities 8,000 population up to 1.3 Million and with the with Dallas And then I got the opportunity to come here to fort worth after speaking with David When I was recruiting to fill this position that I'm feeling right now on an interim basis And so my my career has been built mostly on city management But also with an emphasis on performance improvement and budgeting and fiscal analysis. Thank you. Thank you So we always like to tie back to our vision and mission whenever we begin a new journey And our vision as you can see here does mention that we'll be the most livable and best managed city in the country And so fort worth lab Definitely has that vision in mind Then we look at our mission. It's also about working together to build a strong community And the way we have structured and formatted the fort worth lab is definitely What makes it different perhaps than other efforts in a lot of collaboration, particularly among all departments and all staff We always like to also remind ourselves as staff as we begin a new effort About the strategic vision priorities that you all established here recently As you see on the slide here all three of them supporting the quality of life So what's next as we've talked about it's the fort worth lab And so it's building municipal systems capabilities to explore analyze and learn from data And the why is really important to talk about as as well. So why why would we do this? I think mr. Cook really articulated it well, but It's also enhanced and meaningful public engagement. Uh, that that's the fuel for this uh to make it work Uh collaboration among departments as I mentioned just a moment ago And also making sure that we have our eye on the ball in terms of the council's strategic vision priorities And then better tools to develop and use data analytics So you'll see in a moment where we're bringing in some resources to do that And then looking at our performance trends so that we can begin to what we call bend the curve in a favorable direction As we see trends develop over time Also in enhanced transparency and accountability so that we we own The work that we're doing and then just better informed consideration for both long and short-term decisions So making that happen as has been mentioned the planning and data analytics will be Transformed to become the fort worth lab through the realignment collaboration of people tools and systems before I go into uh the driver, which is really the public engagement and and Hearing from the council and others stakeholders I want to talk a little bit about leadership which will make sure that this is sustainable over time So, uh the whole effort reports up through to the city manager And we want to introduce a corporate advisory board So if you think about fort worth being a really a multi-billion dollar corporation with several thousand employees I think we can learn some things from the private sector Which I have done in in a prior life For them to advise us on best practices in the private sector and how we could apply those in the public sector Now we know we know that government can't necessarily run like a business But we do know that we can borrow best practices from the private sector and use them and you'll see some of those in a moment So the idea here is that uh, mr. Cook would would appoint C-suite executives, uh from Large some of the largest employers in fort worth to serve on this board They'd meet at least twice a year to hear about what we're doing and make suggestions about how we might Further improve the way that we're running as a as an organization The other really critical piece here is the staff leadership steering committee Will be meeting once a month and we'll be talking about the deployment of these strategies the pace that we're we're proceeding at And just all the strategies involved to make sure that it's going to work And also so that they own it and they have a stake a stake in it Then the chief transformation officer Will report up and run the lab on a day to day basis So you don't see this title a lot in public sector. You will see it in private sector And we're we're pleased to introduce it here to to really be accountable for making sure all this works So on the left hand side, this is really the fuel that drives the engine Is all that feedback mechanism? Whether it's the council telling us what your key priorities are and those driving budget decisions and the way we do business on Business planning or it's the community with our traditional surveys, which we still do and we're about to launch another one here in a while Or the traditional town hall meetings, right? Those are still part of this Now if you think about budget comprehensive planning the bond program, those are all public engagement Efforts we want to make sure that those dovetail and that they're working together And that we are kind of cross pollinating information for those efforts and doing it all out of the lab And so we'll also be using a lot more robust platform software platforms to get Feedback from people that perhaps we don't hear from all the time And that will then complement the citizen surveys So I'm going to start going into each of these components First of all, we talk we start with strategic foresight and future shreds So this is working with an outside firm with the Alliance for Innovation Fort Worth is actually a member of this organization So we already get some of their studies and this is looking out as The city manager mentioned 30 50 years from now What does service look like not just in the u.s. But around the world and how service delivery Could be provided for for in the future And then talking to a lot of stakeholders Maybe inside the organization even outside the organization here in fort worth And really discussing what if you know, what if we could do this and how would that work and what sort of technologies out there now So there's a it's a group of futurists That can look at a variety of topics and we're toying with what that first one might be I would envision doing about two of these a year And so we've looked at a number of service areas that we might want to Really hone in on and so, you know, we do a lot of studies now like the matrix studies and the gateway study or city gate studies But that's really about the here and now It's not about what is that service delivery look like 20 30 40 50 years from now And how can we position ourselves now to be able to really take advantage of those new technologies Whether that's artificial intelligence or just a new way of doing things The next piece is data analytics. We do this in the organization Some of our better departments at this or I would say are probably police and perhaps Transportation and public works Experimenting with a lot of tools. So we're we're contracting with the firm called delivery associates This is a this is a firm actually out of the uk, but they have a lot of presence in the us And so they provide us tools And then they train us how to use those tools and it's kind of turn Teaching us how to fish right so after they're gone and then we can still use those tools And what we what we anticipate here is a multi-phase program where we're taking a few departments a year And walking them through the use of these tools helping to train train them in the use of these tools Um, and then you'll see that next with priority based budgeting as well So the first three departments that we're focusing on are police Transportation and public works and we want to use an internal service. Um, so we're going to use human resources To help them to analyze the data and use these new tools in different ways that we've never used before It'll also really start looking at things like predictive analytics and Transportation and public works is already experimenting with with with some of this now About where they need to focus their maintenance dollars or where they may anticipate You know street lights going out that sort of thing The next piece is priority based budgeting and this is moving away from that traditional line item approach where we're really Talking about putting things in front of the council decision packages that are about Does this meet your priority and to what degree does it meet your priorities? So we can rank each of those decision packages in that way So when we ask the departments to submit their budget, they're doing them in alignment with these priorities And so we'll have a firm resource x help us with that again teaching us how to do it So that we don't we don't have to have them on on on board all the time They're kind of a lab partner so to speak for now And so they'll help us prioritize and allocate mapping those costs back to the strategic priorities So the listening sessions that we had with all of you To interpret for us with the what the priorities meant That information will then go into this help us to to prioritize each of these in that way The next piece is what we already do in terms of comprehensive planning And we're as you all are very well aware We're about to launch on a very public effort haven't done that in about 20 years as far as the extent to which we want to engage the public In developing the next comprehensive plan That rfp is already out on the street And we will ask the council to select A service provider mid-summer and then work we will likely begin in the fall So this is what eric and his team has traditionally done But but we're going to go beyond that in this next block So we want to take on the coordination of the bond program still, you know in orchestration with William and his group and Dana and her her group and others on helping to develop that and and Provide all the input that they normally do But then we also want to develop a strategic investment plan. So it's taking All the plans that we have today not just the comprehensive plan, but also area development plans the village plans Tiff plans pit plans water and sewer plans layering all that together And then making recommendations around where do we get the most bang for our buck and be strategic about the investment of our infrastructure So eric and his group along with the budget team We'll be doing that and i'm so excited about this because we're finally marrying the comprehensive planning function with the budgeting function, particularly on the capital side Uh, we're also going to be and I think you're aware of this because it was an ir earlier Look at using Some tools for fiscal analysis around land use decisions So when you have a zoning case or land use change you have some idea about fiscal impacts And so we're looking at providing that information as well out of eric's group This next piece is strategic planning at the department level we'll call it fort worth stat This is a program that you'll find in the nation's largest some nations largest cities where It's a really kind of a quick Review of every department in the city at least twice a year When there's not, you know, you're not fighting a fire in some emergency and it's not the budget process So you can really focus on what's happening And this is where you'll have their SWAT analysis their goals that align back up to the council's strategic priorities You'll also have actions to achieve those goals and what's the dollar amount that might be associated with that So that when we're putting the budget together We've already already know about what the departments might be bringing to us because we've talked about it In these fort worth stat meetings or we call them turn the curve or bend the curve meetings And there'll be statistics statistics statistics in there That we'll be able to to monitor over time and look at those trends And so the new lab will help the departments who develop these strategic plans or the fort worth stat plans The next piece is sunrise reviews This is a kind of a knockoff if you will on sunset reviews I've done sunset reviews in a prior life. They're negative. You never really eliminate whole programs You just really evaluate them and see what you could do better And so we're calling them sunrise reviews because it's about new beginnings and looking at the way we do business And how can we do it differently to make it even better? And so we'll identify opportunities for these maybe two three a year that we'll conduct through the fort worth stat meetings and also through the data analytics And other ways of getting this information up through either the leadership or from employees making suggestions even um The next piece is lean six sigma and the parallel organization Fort worth has a history of the use of lean six sigma I know that we've all heard the staff stand up here and talk about whether it's in lauren's group or You know another group development services how they're using lean six sigma to improve processes Uh with the employees who are closest to the issues understanding them better conducting the analysis And so this is really taking it to a whole another level and deploying it in a whole different way and supporting those efforts that are already happening today But going beyond that and it really enhancing that program across the organization. So let's just say for example We take Two cohorts through the process. Maybe there's 10 to 15 that are in that process per year We teach them how to do lean six sigma But they start their training with the project It's not they go through all their training and okay. Now you have a project They start with the project from the very beginning. So they're starting to make an impact from the very beginning with their project Um, once you get to kind of a critical mass with the number of employees that have gone through this program The mindset on looking at ways things are done Really changes they start looking at it in different ways and said, why don't we do this and why do we still do it this way? And so it really begins to take on the life of its own and move the organization Not just the leadership pulling the organization from the top the people in the from the middle of the organization or even the bottom Pushing it up and forward In an in all in the same direction And that's what I mean when I talk about that parallel organization where you've got this group of people that are really Developing some energy in the organization to move all in that same direction and the last piece Is a As a first in the nation we're working with the government finance officers association of america To deploy a fellowship program around rethinking budgeting And so their initiative on budgeting is is really it's the two differences that I that major differences are number one over the top public engagement So that you really understand what your citizens want and number two Would be The whole idea of party-based budgeting so that it's not just that line item budgeting. It's really about Funding those things that are most important to you as a community And so we'll bring in some fellows each year gfoa will will provide a curriculum And these will be a one-year fellow and hopefully some of these individuals will come on full time with us Not just in the lab, but every department's got budget staff And so this would be a great pipeline for some real talent and some energy Around that in the organization So here's the implementation. We've already we're already bringing on strategic partners To help us with this that I mentioned earlier whether that's delivery associates or alliance for innovation or resource x Um This position that I'm holding now. I'll start recruiting for my replacement that'll fill the position full time in may And then we're realigning our staff to make make sure that we are able to to pull this off And then we'll phase in those each of these components over time And then here's again a timeline in terms of what I just described and we're kind of layering in the proposed budget process