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Carrollton rolls out Cascade platform to link departmental plans, KPIs and council goals
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Summary
Strategic services director Crystal Boyce demonstrated Cascade, a strategy-visualization dashboard that will combine department strategic plans, KPIs and council goals to track progress and support prioritization of budget requests and performance gaps.
Carrollton’s Strategic Services director showed council a new visualization tool intended to make department goals and performance metrics easier to track.
Crystal Boyce demonstrated the Cascade strategy-visualization platform and explained how the tool will connect each department’s three-year strategic plan, its KPIs and the council’s HOME goals so progress can be displayed in real time. Using Public Works as an example, Boyce showed a KPI — the number of cross‑connection control inspections completed — linked to deliverables and a target agreed during the department’s managed competition review.
"Cascade will allow us to demonstrate that we're implementing these plans, and to communicate that progress," Boyce told council, adding that dashboards can show which departmental deliverables are contributing to council goals and where performance gaps exist.
Why it matters: Council members pressed on KPI selection, benchmarking and the risk that metrics can become gamed or misleading. Boyce said the city tracks roughly 1,500–2,000 KPIs across departments and uses the five-year managed competition process to set industry benchmarks and targets; departments can adjust KPIs between managed-competition cycles when operational needs or approved resources change.
Council response and next steps: Members praised the platform’s potential to prioritize additional budget requests (ATBs) by linking performance gaps to resource needs. Boyce confirmed Cascade is intended to complement, not replace, the narrative materials in the annual packet; staff will continue to provide explanatory documents alongside dashboards.
