Webster Groves to publish strategic-plan dashboards, will start reporting Q1 performance in April

Deputy City Manager Davis told the Webster Groves City Council that the city has revised its strategic plan and will begin publishing quarterly performance dashboards so residents can track progress on council goals.

Davis said the council-adopted plan (initially built in 2023) has been condensed and updated and a 27-page draft document is ready for public posting. He said departments and a consultant from Shockey Consulting worked over recent months to reduce the plan’s tactical items from 114 to 72 and to define measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).

The dashboards will be hosted on the city’s dashboard platform and Davis said staff will begin reporting first-quarter data (January–March) with dashboard pages going live in mid-April. Department directors will receive automated links to enter their quarter’s KPI numbers; Davis said departments will have roughly two weeks each quarter to input data and staff will perform verification before public publishing.

Council members and staff discussed what KPIs should be visible to the public versus internal measures. Council member Franklin and others questioned whether some items — for example human resources metrics such as average time-to-hire and employee longevity — are primarily internal performance measures, while Davis and other supporters said trend lines will help identify problems and make reporting more useful. Several members urged paring down measures that are labor-intensive to collect or that do not meaningfully show service outcomes for residents.

Davis showed sample dashboard visuals (drawn from other cities’ public dashboards) and said the reporting pages will let users click into individual tactics and see related graphics and historic data. He said the platform supports additional project modules (for example Prop W and the comprehensive plan) so special initiatives can get their own map and status graphics without separate procurement.

Council members raised operational questions about data governance and retention: where the platform stores historical data, whether the city or a vendor maintains backups, and how Sunshine/Open Records requests would be handled for dashboard data. Davis said the data are held in the vendor’s cloud (the platform) and that staff can run downloadable reports from the system to respond to public-records requests; he acknowledged the city will need internal processes to check and validate inputs.

Davis acknowledged that some of the example numbers shown in the presentation were illustrative and not the city’s final reported values. He said the final dashboards will be published after department directors supply real Q1 data and staff finish verification.