Performance Analyst I/II
The City of Alexandria is located in northern Virginia and is bordered by the District of Columbia (Potomac River), Arlington, and Fairfax counties. With a population of approximately 150,000 and a land area of 15.75 square miles, Alexandria is the seventh largest city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Alexandria has a charming waterfront and is a unique and historic place to live and work. About one-quarter of a square mile in the city has been designated as a national or local historic district. We proudly embrace our rich history and seize the endless opportunities that lie ahead. If you are interested in working for the vibrant City of Alexandria, we invite qualified candidates to apply for our Performance Analyst I/II position in the Office of Performance Analytics (OPA).
Overview
The Performance Analyst position is part of the OPA team dedicated to informing decisions through analytics. As such, the Performance Analyst is responsible for leading research, analysis, and business intelligence projects that provide insights and recommendations to improve the City's service delivery. Given the Office's responsibilities, there is a high degree of access to key stakeholders and leaders, giving projects impact and visibility. A successful candidate will have the expertise and knowledge required to conduct a wide range of analyses, present findings to decision makers, lead collaborative projects, measure service performance, and use relevant business intelligence, analysis, and statistics software. The opportunity is best suited to someone who is self-motivated, creative and curious, willing to take on simultaneous projects, and able to translate complicated findings between stakeholders.
The Opportunity
- Conducting analysis projects that identify insights, findings, and make recommendations to help understand and improve the City's services. Analysis projects are typically written reports presented to department stakeholders, department director(s), City Manager, and/or City Council. Projects focus on critical service delivery challenges and questions of import for the City Manager and departments. These projects range in time requirements, complexity, analytical methods, topic areas, and scope. For example, past projects have included researching, analyzing, and recommending improvements on employee overtime, vehicle crashes, and taxi regulations.
- Creating and facilitating the use of dashboards for citywide business intelligence by using Tableau software to build useful, interactive, and compelling data visualizations. This requires working closely with departments to select indicators, visualize data, and establish a repeatable, collaborative monitoring process to track progress and identify challenges for analysis. Projects have included internal business intelligence dashboards on employee turnover and proactive financial monitoring for auditing purposes as well as public key indicators.
- Centralizing data for analysis and dashboards by identifying the source data system; working with data system owners on business processes; cleaning datasets; verifying the accuracy of datasets; and being sensitive to the handling of protected and personally identifiable data. Data sources range in complexity, quality, and sensitivity.
- The lead analyst for a portfolio of departments, cross-department issues, and/or priority topics potentially including the Fire Department, Department of Human Resources, Department of Transportation and Environmental Services, Department of Information Technology Services, and more. This involves leading related projects, directly working with stakeholders and leaders at all levels, building relationships, spending time on-site, understanding the assigned department's issues and challenges, and collaborating within OPA on cross-department topics.
- Helping to grow a fact informed, high-performance culture in Alexandria that may include conducting trainings on maintaining, using, and understanding data and analysis; advising your portfolio of departments on analytical issues; supporting the growth of business intelligence in the City; leading scientific surveys; and/or supporting the multi-departmental High Performance Organization effort.
- May be assigned other duties due to the dynamic atmosphere of the City government and the City's commitment to analytics.
What You Should Bring
- Enthusiasm for continuously improving service delivery for the Alexandria community through analytics
- Curiosity, inquisitiveness, and initiative
- Creative problem solving to develop innovation solutions
- Collaborative work style that is effective at building relationships with stakeholders at all levels with competing goals
- Highly capable at providing quality, accurate work that is actionable, practical, and valuable
- Effective at working independently and within teams
- Passion and patience for building analytics capability and capacity
- Expertise to apply a wide range of research, analysis, process improvement, and evaluation methods to understand and solve problems
- Effective written and presentation communication for both technical and non-technical audiences including applying best practice data visualizations
- Experience with a variety of data and analytic software platforms and methods
- Knowledge working with data systems of various sizes and complexities for purposes of data collection, analysis, and business intelligence
- Willingness to adapt to change as new challenges and opportunities present themselves
- Interest in learning new skills and about the City government's services and priority issues
About the Department
OPA's mission is to help the City deliver efficient and effective services by informing decisions through measurement and analysis. Specifically, the Office develops, collaborates on, and presents analysis reports, internal business intelligence, public dashboards, and scientific surveys on a wide range of priority topics. This is accomplished by using Tableau (server, desktop, prep), SAS JMP, R Studio, and MS Office (Excel, Visio, PowerPoint, Word) software.
The Office operates as internal consultants for the City, working with all departments and the City's leadership. The team consists of three Performance Analysts, including this advertised position, data and process analysis experts who are led by the Chief Performance Officer. The Office is regularly recognized as a national leader. To find out more about OPA, visit alexandriava.gov/performance.
Minimum & Additional Requirements
Notes
This position requires a criminal record and child abuse background checks prior to employment.