Members of the AGI team first partnered with the City of Southlake to conduct an Information Technology Alignment study for the City. Our team conducted interviews with key staff members to document current business processes and associated technology. Based upon the interviews, the City’s overall IT strategy and the goal of aligning technology to better support business processes, a series of issues and opportunities were outlined. These issues and opportunities were addressed through a series of business cases. Each business case was grouped into short-term, mid-term and long-term projects and included a qualitative cost benefits analysis. A project road-map was developed to guide the City through implementation of the potential projects. Recommendations included a series of short-term projects to improve the City’s procurement process, increase data storage capacity and automate the sharing of information within the DRC Committee process. Longer term recommendations included the selection and implementation of new finance, HR and land management software.

Following adoption of the Strategic Alignment Report, the team was further engaged to complete a requirements gathering, software evaluation and procurement support project. Included in the scope of this assignment is the gathering of business and technical requirements for a full featured ERP system including financials, procurement, utility billing and human resources system. Using a series of facilitated group sessions, the team documented requirements and assisted in the priority ranking of those requirements by the end users. This was followed by the creation of an RFP, the identification of candidate vendors, the preparation of demonstration scripts and the management of the City’s selection process.

Since selection of the Finance and HR ERP software, the team has been providing Southlake with Project Management and Change Management support to the project. In support of these goals, the team tracks and reports project status, coordinates City resources and provide quality assurance reviews of software vendor deliverables.

Additionally, the City of Southlake along with the City of New Braunfels selected the same project team to provide software selection services for comprehensive land and asset management solutions. The team worked with each City to develop and prioritize business requirements, develop a singular RFP for each City and evaluate the proposal responses. The consulting team was also responsible for the coordination of vendor demonstrations and facilitation of the final selection and contract negotiation.

Following a series of high profile and embarrassing failures of internal control and process within the Finance Department of the City of Fort Worth, much of which received significant negative press attention AGI team members were engaged to complete a strategic operational review of the efficiency and effectiveness of the department’s operations. The assessment and recommendations spanned the range of strategic, people/organization, process and technology issues.  Specifically, the scope of the review encompassed all divisions and services of the Finance Department, with a primary focus on the transaction-heavy activities including Accounting, Treasury and Purchasing

Principal findings and observations revolved around issues of organizational culture, organization and staffing, strategic impact, internal control processes and information technology. Among the most important of these findings were that the  Finance Department had not been historically considered a strategic asset of the City government organization and in today’s environment the rigor of executive and policy level oversight of Financial management required significant improvement. We also found that the City lacked well documented financial management procedures, Internal control processes were weak, and training of employees must be improved

Following delivery of the assessment report, we were further engaged to provide independent, third party oversight and quality assurance of the implementation of our recommendations, reporting on a monthly basis to the City Council as the implementation proceeded and to prepare and conduct a series of fiscal literacy / internal controls training for all executives, managers and fiscal staff of the City.

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