For Alberta municipalities on Microsoft 365
Answer council with evidence, not anecdote.
CivicCoach measures organizational health across the Eight Dimensions of Leadership Excellence™ — using structured data from your own people, reported in Power BI, inside your own Microsoft tenant. Your data never leaves it.
Every organization has opinions about how it's doing.
Very few have data.
When council asks how the organization is performing — or a new CAO asks what they've inherited — the honest answer in most municipalities is a collection of impressions. CivicCoach replaces the impressions with a measured baseline.
- Engagement surveys that measure satisfaction but not whether the organization can execute
- A new CAO or council term starting without a documented picture of organizational health
- Departments confident about their own performance, with nothing comparable across them
- Budget debates about culture and capacity argued entirely from anecdote
- Change initiatives launched without a baseline, so nobody can ever show they worked
- The people closest to the problems never asked in a way that's safe to answer honestly
A readiness review hears from your leadership. CivicCoach hears from everyone — and measures it.
Measured against the Eight Dimensions of Leadership Excellence™
Eight dimensions that together describe how work gets directed, supported, and improved — from setting direction to doing the work.
- 1Clear Direction
- 2Leadership Commitment
- 3Awareness of Environment
- 4Planning
- 5Support and Resources
- 6Daily Work
- 7Checking Progress
- 8Improving Together
Minimal input. Maximum output. A short demographic block categorizes every response, so results cut by department, tenure, classification, or location without asking a single extra question. Dozens of derived metrics feed the dashboard from those forty answers.
Built to be trusted. Some ratings are deliberately reversed to suppress response bias. Question sets and participant lists are auto-curated to the size, scale, and structure of your organization — then reviewed and approved by your leadership before a single invitation goes out. No responses are ever attributed to an individual.
Seven stages, one engagement
A fixed sequence from first conversation to a live system — with your leadership approving each gate before the next begins.
- 01EngageScope, fit, agreement.
- 02PrepareSponsorship, strategy settings, curated questions and participants.
- 03AssessSurvey runs. Validation and alerting throughout.
- 04AnalyzeResults become the baseline.
- 05DiscoverScenarios tested against real data.
- 06DesignBlueprints from findings, risk, priority.
- 07DeliverThe design goes live.
Baseline once. Repeat annually.
What you receive
Deliverables land in your tenant, owned by you.
A Documented Baseline
Organizational health measured across all eight dimensions — the picture a new CAO, a new council, or a budget debate can actually stand on.
A Live Power BI Dashboard
Segmented by department, tenure, classification, and location. Not a PDF that ages — a view that answers the next question, and the one after that.
Scenario Modelling
Test a change against real data before committing budget to it. Know what moving a resource, restructuring a unit, or funding a program is likely to do.
A Delivery Blueprint
Findings converted into a sequenced plan with risk and accountability attached — what to do first, who owns it, and what it depends on.
A Repeatable Annual Cycle
The baseline becomes year one. Every annual re-run shows movement dimension by dimension — which means every initiative you fund can finally show its result. This is what "answer council with evidence" looks like in year two.
Why IT signs off
The questions your technology team will ask first — answered.
No new infrastructure
SharePoint, Power Platform, and Power BI — licences you already hold, put to their most productive use.
Data residency unchanged
Everything runs inside your municipality's own Microsoft tenant. Nothing is copied to an external platform, and CivicShift never holds your data.
Configured, not custom-built
The architecture is pre-designed; the engagement fits it to your structure, population, and special considerations. You get proven design, not a science project.
Full audit trail
Every record and action, line by line — compatible with your obligations under POPA and ATIA, and with an auditor's expectations.
Who built it
Designed by someone who's been on both sides of an organizational assessment.
Twenty-three years in Alberta municipal service — eighteen in emergency first response, from frontline firefighter and EMT through lieutenant and captain, then two years as Assistant Chief of Training, finishing as a program manager in municipal HR & Safety. Thirty years in operations overall, across the private and public sectors, including emergency management and ICS Logistics Section Chief roles.
CivicCoach was designed by someone who has been measured by an organizational assessment, and accountable for the result of one. That's why every question earns its place, why leadership approves the instrument before it runs, and why the deliverable is a working dashboard instead of a binder.
- Alberta Minister's Award of Excellence
- B.App.B. Emergency Services Management, with distinction (2020)
- MIT Sloan — AI Implications on Business Strategy (2024)
- Author — Eight Dimensions of Leadership Excellence and One System, Not Many
Where to start
Two doors into the same framework. Most organizations take them in order.
Start with the Organizational Readiness Review
Three weeks, $6,500 flat: confidential leadership interviews, a scorecard, and a ranked plan. If the findings say the whole organization should be measured, your Review fee applies against CivicCoach in full. See the Readiness Review →
Go straight to CivicCoach
If you already know you need the measured baseline — a new CAO, a new term of council, a transformation you'll have to prove — the engagement is scoped to your organization's size and structure at the Engage stage, with a fixed fee agreed before anything begins.
Either way, the walkthrough comes first: thirty minutes, and you see the live dashboard on a sample municipality before you decide anything. No engagement is contingent on buying anything else.
Questions
How is this different from an employee engagement survey?
Engagement surveys measure how people feel. CivicCoach measures whether the organization can execute — direction, planning, resources, daily work, progress checking, and improvement, as experienced by the people doing the work. Feelings are one input; organizational health is the output. And because it re-runs annually against the same baseline, it shows movement, not moments.
How long does the survey take our people?
Forty questions — three rated and two written per dimension — plus a short demographic block. Most people finish in well under half an hour, once. That's the entire ask of your workforce; the dashboard derives dozens of metrics from those answers so nobody is ever surveyed twice for the same insight.
Can results be traced back to individuals?
No. Responses are reported at the aggregate level, segments are protected by minimum group sizes, and no deliverable attributes anything to a person. Participants are told this before they begin — it's the reason the written answers are worth reading.
What does IT have to install or approve?
Nothing new. CivicCoach runs on SharePoint, Power Platform, and Power BI inside your existing tenant, under your existing security policies, with a full line-by-line audit trail. Data residency doesn't change because the data never moves.
What does it cost?
The fee is fixed and scoped at the Engage stage to your organization's size and structure — agreed in writing before anything begins, with no hourly billing and no change orders. If you've completed an Organizational Readiness Review, that fee applies against CivicCoach in full.
How do leadership approvals work?
Question sets and participant lists are auto-curated to your organization, then reviewed and approved by your leadership before a single invitation goes out. Nothing runs that your sponsor hasn't seen.
What happens after year one?
The baseline becomes your reference point. The annual re-run shows movement across all eight dimensions — which initiatives moved the numbers, and which didn't. That year-over-year view is where the assessment pays for itself.
See the dashboard before you decide anything
Book a thirty-minute walkthrough. Every module runs on a live sample municipality — you'll see exactly what your leadership team would see, with real segmentation and real scenario modelling. No deck, no commitment.
Or email directly — troy.palmer@civicshiftai.com
"Let the computers do the computer stuff, so people can do the people stuff."
