An initial sprint and follow-on engagement for a capital city's executive office. Operational and financial data unified into a single steering view, refreshed on a cadence the leadership team could actually act on. Roughly forty-two percent improvement in operational efficiency on the workflows the new reporting informed. A clean foundation the city's internal team continues to extend.
The problem
The data was already there. It lived across departments, vendors, ERP systems, contract registers, project trackers — each fragment owned by a different team, structured in a different shape, refreshed on a different cadence.
City leadership was making operational decisions every week without an integrated view. In practice that meant prioritizing the loudest issue rather than the most expensive one. It meant approving cost movements without seeing the full pattern they were part of. It meant being reactive in a role that needed to be proactive.
What was missing was a steering view: one place where the financial and operational picture lived together, refreshed often enough to support the actual rhythm of leadership decisions.
What we did
The work moved through three phases.
Audit. We mapped what data the city already held, where it lived, and what it could realistically answer. The exercise identified the three most expensive blind spots leadership was operating in — places where decisions were being made on partial information and the gap was costing real money.
Architecture. We designed a financial-planning and operational-reporting layer that pulled from the existing source systems without requiring them to be replaced. In a public-sector context, any architecture that depends on system replacement is a multi-year programme rather than a sprint output. Our design respected what was already paid for and in production.
Delivery and rhythm. We built the layer, populated it from live sources, and wired it into a leadership-facing reporting cadence. A weekly review was built into the executive office's existing meeting rhythm — the dashboard became part of how the office already worked, not a parallel artefact someone had to remember to consult.
The result
Three outcomes.
The view. Leadership now opens a single integrated picture of operational and financial position. Decisions that used to require weeks of cross-departmental requests now happen in the meeting they were called for.
The efficiency gain. Operational efficiency on the workflows the new reporting informs improved by roughly forty-two percent. The gain came from two sources: faster decisions on the items leadership now sees clearly, and the elimination of the manual reconciliation work the old fragmented setup demanded every cycle.
The handover. The city's internal data function owns the architecture and continues to extend it. Documentation covers the data model, the ingestion logic, and the runbook for adding the next source system. No vendor lock-in.
The work that was supposed to produce a dashboard ended up changing how the executive office made decisions on a Monday morning.