City of Fort Worth
Planning & Data Analytics Director​
Mackenzie Eason & Associates has been retained by the City of Fort Worth to help recruit their Planning & Data Analytics Director.  In connection with other organizational changes, the City Manager has created a new Planning and Data Analytics Department consisting of 29 authorized positions drawn from the Performance and Budget Department and the Planning and Development Department.  The creation of this department was effective on January 4, 2020, and the Director will report to an Assistant City Manager.

The Planning and Data Analytics Department is responsible for forecasting demographic and economic trends as well as municipal revenues and expenditures; analyzing the fiscal impact and return on investment of policy options; conducting a variety of citywide and small-area planning studies; and conducting performance and budget studies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal operations.  The department will look at past data and forecasts to understand why forecasts may have been inaccurate, allowing the City to better forecast for the future.  The department will produce a series of four interrelated documents each year: the Comprehensive Plan, a Strategic Plan for the organization, the five-year Capital Improvements Program, and the Budget, as depicted by the following diagram.  
Creating the new department required the City to reconfigure the existing Performance and Budget Department.  The new department has retained the Director, a Senior Administrative Assistant, seventeen (17) positions from the Budget and Analysis Division, and four (4) positions from the Performance Section.  They also transferred five (5) positions in the Comprehensive Planning Section, plus the Senior Capital Projects Officer, from the Planning and Development Department to Planning and Data Analytics.

The vision for the Planning & Data Analytics Department is to directly support the City of Fort Worth in its continuing vision to be “the most livable and best managed city in the country” by creating great places for people to live, work, and play.  The City of Fort Worth aspires to become an organization of national prominence; being recognized for taking holistic and innovative approaches towards enhancing the quality of life for Fort Worth’s residents. 

The Opportunity
​The use of data analytics allows our city leaders and planners to gain deeper insights into current and future scenarios and to plan in a more precise manner to cater to the needs of Fort Worth’s population.  It is the foundation of the performance management programs that allow Fort Worth to ensure continuous improvement, facilitate interdepartmental collaboration, improve private sector partnerships, and expand public engagement.  The rapid growth that our city continues to experience puts strain on the infrastructure, which means data-driven solutions are central to making city operations more efficient and effective.  Data analytics help better identify potential gaps that the City needs to address as well as opportunities available.  This helps our leaders get a better sense of future needs for infrastructure and amenities, so they can then optimally allocate resources over different time periods and make effective policy decisions about the use of resources.

The Planning and Data Analytics Director will unify the newly consolidated teams and reinforce the culture of problem solving, innovation, and shared responsibility for achieving the department and City visions.  The Director will oversee all areas of long-term comprehensive City Planning, will understand how to strategically plan and implement capital improvement projects in the City’s long-term vision, and be acutely attuned with how development patterns affect the financial condition of the City.  The Director will ultimately be responsible for updating the annual budget cycle each year, assisting the City Departments with their respective budgets and capital improvement programs, and correlate it all together in the Comprehensive Plan and Strategic Plan for the City of Fort Worth.    
  
Some challenges to be addressed over the next 3-5 years include: 
  • Transforming the current conventional city planning mindset to that of smart city planning and implementing the big data principles throughout the organization.
  • Aligning all departments across the City to adapt to a more data driven approach and utilize the similar data points.
  • Assessing the integration and quality of available data and identifying ways to enhance its quality in city planning projects to ensure efficient and accurate project success.
  • Providing factual and data driven information to the City Manager’s Office and City Council to make more informed policy decisions that lead to innovative comprehensive strategies to manage sustainable urban growth and ROI on public investments.
  • How to use capital improvements strategically for long term development of the City, ensuring the Comprehensive Plan policies are applied.  
 
Several general principles will guide the new department’s performance.  In some respects, these principles represent departures from the status quo and, to that extent, it will be the responsibility and discretion of the Director to make any necessary significant adjustment and training for affected staff members.

  • Staff versatility with focused expertise:  All budget analysts will be versatile enough to work effectively on elements of the Comprehensive Plan, the Strategic Plan, the Capital Improvements Program, and the Budget as they pertain to the specific departments that they are assigned to support.  They will develop broad and deep expertise about the departments that they support, and managers in those departments will recognize their budget analysts as valuable sources of advice and assistance on critical policy issues affecting their departments.  All staff members will understand, and will help decision-makers to understand, how planning- and performance-related decisions affect the budget and vice versa. 
 
  • Closer linkages among functions: Planning and budgeting activities will continue to be largely decentralized among operating departments, but P&DA staff will coordinate these activities more effectively and will align them more closely with the City’s long-range goals and strategies.  The department’s four major annual products – the Comprehensive Plan, the Strategic Plan, the Capital Improvements Program, and the Budget – will be mutually consistent.  Each of these documents will reinforce the others and staff will engage all City departments in preparing them.  To ensure alignment with long-range goals and strategies, P&DA staff will accept budget improvement packages only for initiatives that appear specifically in corresponding elements of the annual Comprehensive Plan and/or the annual Strategic Plan.  Furthermore, the Capital Improvements Program will clearly demonstrate how proposed capital improvements will effectively implement long-range goals and strategies as set forth in the Comprehensive Plan.  P&DA staff will recommend capital funding only for projects that appear in the annual Capital Improvements Program. 
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  • Greater staff engagement on critical issues: P&DA will prepare an annual work program of planning, performance, and budget studies for review and approval by the City Manager’s Office no later than September of each year.  Staff may amend this work program at any time during the fiscal year with approval by the CMO.  The following are a few examples of these special studies.
    1. Planning studies: Formulating a coordinated set of land use, infrastructure investment, and economic development policies that will promote greater tax base balance; establishing an open space acquisition and preservation program.
    2. Performance studies: Coordinating communication and public information functions across the organization; improving the City’s development review process.
    3. Budget studies: Analyzing staffing needs in Police and Code Compliance; updating solid waste and environmental fees.
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  • Better public involvement: Full and meaningful public participation will be important to the success of our planning, programming, and budgeting process.  Toward that end, P&DA staff will reach out to various interested groups in the community and offer to meet with them at least once each year to present pertinent information and request comments.  Target groups will include City boards and commissions, Council district assemblies, neighborhood alliances, chambers of commerce, other economic development organizations, and interested trade associations, such as the Real Estate Council and the Builders Association.  The subject and content of the presentations will inevitably vary from one group to the next. 

Matrix Management Model
To manage its varied yet interrelated workload, the new department will use a matrix management model whereby each budget analyst will formally report to a Budget Manager, but informally accept direction from several different managers overseeing specific functions.  This matrix management model can produce valuable results for the organization, but will require extensive communication, coordination, and cooperation among the Director, managers and staff to prevent confusion about lines of authority and responsibility.
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Each of the three Budget Managers will oversee budget analysts providing support to the departments associated with one or more Assistant City Manager groups.  This arrangement is intended to promote close interaction between the Budget Managers and the corresponding ACMs.  Each budget analyst in turn will support one or more departments through all phases of the annual planning, programming, and budgeting process and on any special studies pertaining to those departments.   
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Decentralized Planning Model
The department’s Comprehensive Planning Section consists of only five planners, but this section convenes and coordinates the work of many planners associated with various operating departments as depicted in the following diagram.  The Planning and Data Analytics Director must therefore be effective in facilitating interdepartmental cooperation, dispute resolution, and consensus building.  The Director must be able simultaneously to find common ground among competing interests and to lead the community in new directions.      

Planning & Data Analytics Department Organizational Chart

City of Fort Worth Executive Team

David Cooke- City Manager
David Cooke- City Manager
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Jay Chapa, Assistant City Manager
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Fernando Costa
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Valerie Washington
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Dana Burghdoff
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Kevin Gunn

2020 Initiatives & City Manager Focus
EXPECTATIONS AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE CITY
  • We have a shared responsibility for managing the city/ corporation.  We establish organization-wide principles, priorities, and values.  Department heads run departments as long as they don’t violate the previous statements. 
  • We represent the customer; we represent and protect the taxpayer; we represent our employees.  In all our decisions, we must balance these groups.
  • There’s always a plan.  Nothing just shows up.  Surprises are the exception.
  • For a plan to be successful, process and inclusion are important.  Having the right process and including the right people will save time (in the end).  Include others that do not think like you.
  • ​We can question and challenge each other; we support each other.
  • We are accountable to each other for our commitments.
  • Our responsibility is to provide the best service at the lowest cost . . . regardless of who provides it.  Cost equals total costs.
  • Our responsibility is to recommend the best “business decision for the city.”  These recommendations are supported by thorough evaluation of options using data and objective criteria.
  
WHAT DO WE WANT CITIZENS, CUSTOMERS, VISITORS, TAXPAYERS TO SAY ABOUT THE CITY OF FORT WORTH?
  • Great customer service:  responsive, respectful, attentive, friendly
  • Business-like, professionally managed
  • Creative problem solvers; solutions-oriented
  • Tight; fiscally conservative
  • Open and transparent:  nothing to hide and everything to share
  • Optimistic and future oriented

Employees at the City of Fort Worth provide municipal services to over 900,000 residents.  Each day, these employees are moving about the city, doing work that helps make Fort Worth a strong community and a great place to live.  There are six values that guide our employees as they go about this work.  They are:
As Fort Worth continues to grow and change, these principles help keep employees on point, providing the best service to citizens, businesses and fellow employees.

The Ideal Candidate
The Planning & Data Analytics Director should ideally be an expert in the principles of data-driven comprehensive smart city planning and should be a visible and articulate champion of those principles, both within the organization and around the community.  The Planning & Data Analytics Director should also be able to use relevant data effectively in assessing the needs for each department's improvements and in communicating the City’s progress toward its short- and long-term goals. 

The next Director must be a collaborative, innovative, astute professional who is adept in operating in a fast-paced environment.  The successful candidate should exhibit strong personal leadership skills that can mentor a young and talented team and increase department performance.  They should have a passion for working in large municipal planning and city budget management that is balanced with long term strategic vision and big data driven analytics.  Lastly, they must be able to build consensus among multiple and very diverse constituencies both internally and externally. ​
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Leadership and business acumen are fundamental and the capacity to influence and impact our City and community, as well as be a catalyst and a strategist is critical to success.  It requires leadership, judgment, management, mentorship, and results-orientation, as well as provides important partnership and cooperation with internal departments and external stakeholders of the development community.

The ideal candidate will possess experience, knowledge and skills in the following areas:
  • Methods and techniques of statistical data collection and analysis and translating the findings into strategic action
  • Principles, strategies and techniques of short and long term municipal comprehensive planning and understanding how it impacts the financial condition of the City
  • Development and implementation of capital improvement programs that align with the long-range goals of the City
  • Principles and practices of municipal budget preparation, financial reporting and administration
  • Adaptable and strong supervisory experience that can boost and maintain positive employee morale and to inspire them to maximize their performance and consistently provide the highest level of internal/ external customer service
  • Robust track record of collaboration and building strong partnerships with community and business stakeholders, non-profits, neighborhood groups, City departments, and other governmental agencies 
  • Solid negotiation skills in a broad range of project-related and administrative functions 
  • Managing organizational change through the development and implementation of departmental goals, objectives, policies and priorities for each assigned service area
  • Be able to build consensus among multiple and very diverse constituencies both internally and externally 
 
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE
Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university with major coursework in urban planning, data analytics or similar field, such as business management or public administration and eight years responsible experience in comprehensive city planning, city management or a closely related field, including four years of administrative and supervisory experience.