• San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)

Government

Government

Overview

In addition to the typical IT-management concerns shared with private-sector businesses, public sector agencies must navigate detailed regulation regimes, annual funding re-approval, and the frequent restructuring of mission and roles. The public has seen IT dramatically change their daily lives, and have grown to expect modern web and data tools to serve their needs. Government agencies are working hard to meet these expectations as well.

Core Issues

  • As government agencies reorganize frequently, maintaining momentum in implementing technology strategies — from driving implementation projects to ongoing training — can be a recurring challenge.
  • Federal, state, and local agencies are often are supported through a diverse array of legacy processes and technology solutions. They seek smart solutions that capitalize on the best of their current systems, and strategically invest in new technologies to make up any gaps.
  • The push to provide open government through new technology requires a balanced approach to supporting disclosure, engagement, and participation, while at the same time maintaining safety, and security, and clear guidelines.

Our Approach

In working with federal, state, and local government agencies, FivePaths implements optimum technologies while complying with existing regulations and requirements. Our experience in these areas allows us to quickly navigate the vendor-acquisition and contracting processes and proceed directly to your IT project. FivePaths is a Local Business Enterprise (LBE) and Technology Marketplace vendor with the City of San Francisco, and is registered as an approved vendor with several state and local government agencies. We bring transparent, open processes and technology that agencies can easily operate and sustain over the long term, while maintaining security and safety for all users.

Profile: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is responsible for the management of all ground transportation in the city. The agency oversees Muni (the historic Municipal Railway), parking and traffic, bicycling, walking and taxis. Over one million people get around San Francisco and rely on SFMTA to ensure safe and reliable travel.

Challenges

The SFMTA runs a high demand online resource with millions of pageviews and many internal content curation teams. A key challenge was to expose the most in demand services and resources up front, while providing simple landing page access to deeper content, in a visually compelling presentation. Internally, content and administrative teams were burdened with multiple, complicated workflows, and in some cases not having the right mix of features to do their very best work online. Managing these concerns along with parallel and overlapping branding and CRM projects compounded the need to be very efficient and creative with the online approach.

Solutions and Impacts

FivePaths works in partnership with numerous stakeholder groups inside and outside of SFMTA to discover, plan, design, implement and support many SFTMA systems, including a complete redesign and rebuild of sfmta.com and Salesforce development for several teams including the Commuter Shuttle, Temporary Signs, Taxi and Property Assessors Office. Our website work focused on designing strong, well organized page templates for easier content creation, simplified workflow and approval processes for faster and higher quality data display and content publication, and search/monitoring tools for proactively discovering and addressing challenge points to reduce costly surprises. Flexible templates allow for teams within SFMTA to approach campaign and other specialized content in unique ways while adhering to a framework that keeps the systems operating very efficiently. Working in an agile approach, we engaged teams along the way throughout discovery, design and implementation, allowing us to adjust to improve solutions along the way. 

We deliver standard architectures in all the CRM and CMS solutions we build for SFMTA, including landing and detail web pages that provides a unified experience for visitors and configurable Salesforce automations using flows and process builder to generate easy to understand reporting. The most important information is up front on main tabs of Salesforce and on the home page of the website, with landing pages provided easy search tools for quickly finding more detail. Improving short message presentation enables for faster scanning and shortens the time visitors must spend hunting for answers to questions - dramatically speeding up the workflow for both website public visitors as well as site and database administrators. Thematic and administrative navigations along with quick links and search options provide a diversity of ways to get to data fast. Map and chart integrations, enhanced project pages and route and stops sections provides a very usable solution for visitors, whether on the big screen or on the go in mobile.

The vast and deep resources available through the SFMTA requires strong leadership to engage smartly on projects. FivePaths works closely with many stakeholders on communication and project management strategies to keep the projects both efficient and easygoing. Our collaborative team includes content developers, project managers, instructional designers, and web-design and development experts working on all aspects of the project, from strategic planning through development and implementation. 

We continue to provide ongoing support to help keep SFMTA websites and Salesforce systems secure and trouble-free, and to address new feature requests as the programs grow and change. These ongoing services include advance mapping, transit schedules integration, new workflow and automations, social media strategy, software and vendor research, strategic technology consulting, and trainings on CRM and CMS systems.

Visit the SFMTA website: https://www.sfmta.com.