Leaders are expected to be able to explain what’s happening, how long it will take to fix and what can be done to avoid an issue next time. But in many local governments, those answers aren’t readily available.
Plan review performance is often only understood in hindsight, reconstructed from static reports that don’t reflect what’s happening right now. That makes it difficult for city leaders to respond with confidence, let alone intervene before issues escalate.
As expectations on local governments for transparency and accountability rise, agencies need a clearer, more immediate understanding of how plan review is performing day to day.
THE LIMITS OF AFTER-THE-FACT REPORTING
Over the last decade, many local governments have invested heavily in digital transformation, moving paper-based plan review and permitting processes online. Digitalizing was an imperative of the 21st century, but it alone doesn’t solve a growing challenge for city leaders — understanding performance in time to act.
Leaders are increasingly facing calls from leadership and council to answer:
- Where are bottlenecks forming across departments?
- Are service-level commitments being met, and why or why not?
- Are any projects at risk of delay, and what can we do to get them back on track?
But when reporting depends on a patchwork system of data exports, manual cleanup and disparate business tools, insights take time to compile and end up fragmented. This leaves leaders managing retroactively, reacting to the impact of problems instead of anticipating them.
In today’s environment — where expectations for transparency and turnaround continue to rise — that reactive approach is harder to justify.
WHY REAL-TIME VISIBILITY IS ESSENTIAL
Plan review performance affects more than internal operations. As applications get backlogged, plan review delays ripple outward — all the while slowing housing and development delivery, frustrating builders and homeowners, and complicating conversations with elected officials.
At the same time, departments are being asked to demonstrate accountability and productivity with ever-fewer resources. Clear, timely insight into workloads, cycle times and review status helps leaders make informed decisions about staffing, training and process improvements before small issues turn into systemic ones.
That’s why forward-thinking agencies are beginning to rethink how reporting fits into their technology stack. Instead of treating analytics as something layered on after the fact, they’re looking for ways to surface performance data directly within the systems staff already use every day.
BRINGING INSIGHT CLOSER TO THE WORK
Plan review platforms, like Avolve, are responding to leaders’ requests for more streamlined data insights by evolving their product functionality.
Avolve Insights™ enables analytics to be embedded into Avolve’s plan review solutions, DigEplan and ProjectDox. Rather than requiring agencies to pull data into external tools, Avolve turns day-to-day activity into live dashboards and standardized reports for at-a-glance insight.
For leadership teams, clear, accessible insights mean:
- Visibility into plan review performance without relying on manual exports.
- Earlier signals when workloads spike or review cycles slow down.
- Consistent reporting for department heads, executives and councils.
In making data on performance available as the work is done, agencies can better understand the health of their plan review operations and address issues sooner to keep projects on time and on budget.
A TOOL FOR COMMUNICATION, NOT JUST OPERATIONS
Real-time insight goes beyond being beneficial only to internal management. It also plays a role in how agencies communicate progress and challenges to elected officials and the public.
When leaders can clearly show where time is being spent, what’s improving and where constraints exist, they can have conversations about budgets, staffing and policy that are grounded in evidence, all the while bolstering council trust.
INSIGHTS ON INSIGHTS: WEBINAR
In an era of constrained budgets and rising demand, blind spots are costly. Agencies that invest in timely, trustworthy insight are better positioned to spot risks early, allocate resources effectively and keep projects moving.
To learn how Avolve Insights is helping public-sector teams move from manual reporting to real-time executive intelligence, register for our webinar.
We’ll show how agencies are using built-in analytics to spot bottlenecks sooner, support council conversations and lead community development with confidence.
Reserve your spot today to see how local government is finding the pulse of plan review.
About the Author
The leader in plan review, Avolve is trusted by 350+ governments with their innovation-focused plan review platforms.
