Keller Staff Augmentation Supplements Workload

Challenge: Initially, the City of Keller had been, for more than a year, seeking to fill their Assistant Public Works Director role. This role would assist the Public Works Director in developing and prioritizing the City’s CIP list and drainage improvements, assist the Water and Wastewater Department in prioritizing assets and maintenance schedules, assist with traffic operations, including transportation improvement design and review and traffic signal communication, and assist with public works operations project management and development of operations best practices.

Solution: HR Green was contracted in October of 2021 and approached the City with a team of qualified individuals to fill the Assistant Public Works Director position. Each team member of the HR Green staff had previously worked in municipal positions, bringing knowledge and experience to each task where the City needed assistance.

Since then, HR Green has successfully filled the role initially identified while also expanding services to the City and showing true value added by augmenting staff and the City’s needs within a “Service on Demand” framework. During the first year of our contract, we have expanded the City of Keller staff augmentation contract when needed in the following roles:

All roles have been filled by personnel in our Colleyville office when called upon by the City. In many cases, each of these roles would require ten full-time employees, which presents an annual cost burden to the City regardless of whether or not there is workload to support each position. In total, all of these roles would cost the City in over $1M in annual salaries and benefits.

As the City of Keller needed the expertise but did not have the workload to support all 10 of these roles, they turned to HR Green to deliver each of these services only when needed. In comparison, the City of Keller has spent just over $330K on each of these roles by choosing to pursue the “Service on Demand” alternative to augmenting staff. This represents over 70% in cost savings to the City and enables the service to expand as needed or until the work load for any one or all of these roles is sufficient to support a full FTE.

We are currently assisting the City of Keller staff augmentation contract with process improvements and changes in the streets, drainage, and traffic operations division in our roles as Assistant Public Works Director. We also provide project management and public works inspections of the City’s $3.5M sidewalk program. This program is a high priority for the City Council and requires a commitment from public works staff to deliver this program within a specified time frame.

Benefit: HR Green’s commitment to this contract has resulted in several tangible results to benefit the City, which include:

• Development and implementation of a project plan to address a backlog of approximately 4,000 sidewalk locations in need of repair, effectively clearing the City work order backlog of these requests.
• Wrote RFP documents to advertise for bids for sidewalk repair projects.
• Assisted in the selection of contractors and vendors for sidewalk repair projects through RFP processes.
• Assisted the City with the development of transportation design and improvements.
• Development of the City’s road marking and pavement management plans.
• Provided on-site support staff augmentation services for the City as needed.
• Site inspections for sidewalk projects.