The team no longer approaches problems and solutions in a limited project-focused fashion, however, many of the past projects listed below have driven the continuous mission of providing highly impactful input to the significant challenges of today.

The Office of Strategic Initiatives

Following the fulfillment of the original Bloomberg Philanthropies goal of establishing innovation within a city's existing institutional framework, the work of the Bloomberg-supported Innovation Team was fully realized as critical to the delivery of effective services. Thus, the first-ever Mayor’s Office of Strategic Initiatives was established to continue the collaborative work with colleagues in pursuing more meaningful, impactful, and positive service delivery to the citizens of the city of Mobile, Alabama.

Africatown Collaboration

Why it matters

In order to prepare for the influx of attention and awareness to the Africatown area of the City of Mobile, it is imperative that an environmental ecosystem is built on collaboration and engagement of the residents, the community, organizations, and other interested parties alike to align their visions and purpose.

Current Result: We began the engagement process by gathering information and strategically aligning stakeholders in the Africatown Community. During this time, we engaged with each community organization identified, as well as other community stakeholders. The process involved a series of individual interviews, group interviews/workshops, community tours, observations, and more. Following these, we developed with the community-at-large a community composite, which includes (but is not limited to): residents, community leaders, religious leaders, business/industry, education and government leaders, banking and financial institutions, non-profit and environmental leaders. Finally, we previewed and delivered the Africatown Community Stakeholder Alignment Composite to the community.

City Performance Analytics

Why it matters

In order to make informed decisions, City leaders rely on critical information being brought to them in a timely manner. Yet, due to a lack of capability to decisively examine, inquire, and understand city activity, driven by shared definitions among departments and teams, the discussions around ongoing activities often lack the cohesion necessary to allow for accurate assessment of progress and status. Thus, we believe that to truly empower the decision-makers it is paramount for an available pathway that allows leaders to ask the right questions of the right people about the right issues.

Hypothesis: If we develop a reliable and accurate information management system that provides officials with the necessary feedback and insight germane to their needs then we expect to see improved communication amongst all intra and interdepartmental channels.

Current Result: The introduction in early 2020 of the new activity tracking system, an initiative developed by the innovation team, has so far seen a greater than approximately 85% + efficiency improvement in the time to completion of the 20 most time-consuming service requests and a greater than approximately 75% + efficiency improvement in the time to completion of the 20 most requested service requests. Additionally, the team has established a set of critical actionable reports, provided on a daily basis, while continuing to work with individual departments to enable self-sustainable insight capabilities.

Coronavirus Pandemic Response

Why it matters

Communities across the globe were facing unprecedented challenges during the global pandemic and no city, including our own, went untouched. In response, we collaborated, listened, and worked with City leaders across the world to implement fast-acting strategies that allowed us to counteract its growing effects head-on to eventually dissipate this challenge. A key element of this response was the team’s guidance in bringing together regional hospitals and building them better tools to manage their first-line response while driving data-led policy actions from public officials. Further, in order for the key principals to direct all the engaged entities and to make timely and deeply-informed public-impact decisions, it required the full awareness of all necessary information as conditions changed. As the awareness of these needs evolved, we knew that if we could assist entities to better anticipate, plan and manage capacities, capabilities, and critical needs then we could eventually get to a point where the response was not about weathering the storm but pushing back against the oncoming waves.

Result: The team developed and introduced the capability to accurately and critically track the on-the-ground situation of the pandemic while establishing an ability to acutely forecast the volatility—driven situation as it evolved. The team’s guidance in utilizing critical automated reporting methodologies to analyze and track ongoing conditions were adopted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, within the Bloomberg cities network, and by entities all across the globe.

City of Mobile Parks & Recreation Department

Why it matters

In a locality, the parks and recreation services are often the initial entry point for residents when engaging in their city. Thus, we believe that it is critically important that this department and the services that they provide are held to the standards and approach that we desire as citizens ourselves. Working with and assisting our MPRD, the innovation team led an intra-departmental effort to engage all levels of staff from frontline workers to executives by including and taking each individual and respective teams through a strategic process of re-evaluation and reorientation of their core values, goals, mission, and vision. Finally, we were able to help department leadership establish a new culture that is no longer limited by the resources and beliefs on hand but rather strives to create “fun and safe spaces where everybody is somebody”.

311 Constituency Services

Why it matters

Due to a lack of information, resources, and shared understanding about how and what to report as an issue to the city, the engagement process can be difficult to navigate for both citizens and staff. Thus, we believe that working with and assisting our constituency services to address their challenges will have a significant impact on the lives of citizens.

Hypothesis: If we improve the ability, accuracy, and awareness of city-provided services then we expect to see an increase in both the knowledge of and sentiment that city issues are being addressed and a perceived expectation regarding ongoing city service capabilities.

Result: The introduction in early 2020 of the new constituency services system, an initiative created by the innovation team, has seen an approximate 40% + efficiency improvement across all citizen service requests. The innovation team also led an overhaul of the goals and purpose of the original 311 mission and cultivated a new citywide understanding of what the innovation team-developed approach of “constituency services” actually encompasses while implementing the city’s first official Work From Home remote work option for staff.

Competitiveness on the Gulf Coast

Why it matters

The planning, permitting, and inspection process has long been a pain point for many citizens, prospective business owners, and investors in our city. In response, delivery of a combinative high-impact package to make Mobile more business and family friendly required an acute understanding of the intertwined relationships between economic development, process improvement, and customer service initiatives.

Hypothesis: If we improve the image, speed, and transparency of our urban development services provided for construction, renovations, and business start-ups then we expect our increased competitiveness on the gulf coast will be reflected by positive changes in the population dynamics of the city.

Key deliverables

Correlative understanding between our customers' frustrations and the city's relevant communications, processes, and touchpoints.

Consolidation of several relevant city structures into a new department called Build Mobile.

Illuminated sectors from research that city outreach should engage to make sure all perspectives are captured and included in the decision-making process.

Interviews with a broad range of people who use our business and building services, transcribing accurately to ensure that we were capturing our extremes, identifying key characteristics from interviewees, and mapping them on relativity scales.

Operational dashboards that enabled a departmental capability to utilize automated reporting toolsets as a means to track daily permitting and inspection activities.

Persona experiences that tracked varying touchpoints within the department, finding that even if we addressed only one group’s frustrations then we would have a cascading effect on all others thus making our final assessments all the more impactful.

Process mapping that furthered our understanding of the system as-is, conducted through multiple workshops that comprehensibly mapped the process for developing in Mobile, as well as, several follow-up meetings to share/refine our process map. To date, we are on the eighth iteration of the map.

Qualitative user research to solidly ground our understanding of how the system works and formulate a plan to strategically engage our customers.

Relationships with city employees were built from an engagement with all staff from front-line and middle-managers to the leadership team.

Research aimed to better understand the needs, desires, perceptions, and experiences of developers in Mobile, from beginner to expert.

Tracking metrics to measure efficiency, effectiveness, and progress for workflow practices to meet department set goals.

Twenty-six preliminary research meetings & thirteen inspector ride-along to lay a foundation for further research and initiatives moving forward.

Blight

OBJECTIVE

For decades, blighted homes have slowly affected the surrounding properties, dragging property values down and creating safety concerns in their wake. Even so, a true blight survey had never been conducted before this i-team project kicked off. In order to understand how deep a problem runs, you have to understand its extent, so we sought to create Mobile’s first inventory of blight. We used Instagram as a pilot, utilizing its mapping feature to take photos of blighted properties and map their locations.

Once the idea had been proven useful, the City’s GIS department took our idea and ran with it. They helped develop a true blight inventory map, and the Neighborhood Development department’s Code Enforcement team deployed and surveyed all homes in Mobile city limits. This helped us understand blight’s scope and impact on the city.

That’s when the tide began to turn on blight. With the invaluable partnership of the Neighborhood Development department, we worked to create a process for addressing blighted properties. We revisited state legislation to ensure we were using legal channels effectively and fairly, and the city began addressing blighted properties one by one. Today, the program is even more robust: grants are available for low-income owners interested in rehabilitating their properties; a free, legal will program helps owners designate their properties to their next of kin; and as a last resort, vacant, blighted homes are being demolished.

As with many initiatives, blight is continuous in nature: as time goes on, homes go unkept, owners pass away without passing the property on, and new properties find their way into the blight inventory. The City continues to work to reduce blight year over year.