Local government agencies are drowning in data but starved for insight.

Across planning, building and community development, local government systems generate thousands of data points every week: intake timestamps, review cycles, resubmittals, handoffs, approvals. Yet for city leaders and executives, a fundamental question remains surprisingly hard to answer:

How well is plan review actually performing—and where is it breaking down?

Too often, the answer arrives late, buried in spreadsheets manually assembled for council meetings or budget reviews. By the time leaders can actually visualize the data, the opportunity to intervene has long passed.

As communities face mounting pressure to deliver housing, infrastructure and economic growth with limited resources, this lag is no longer sustainable. Plan review has become a strategic pillar of community development and executive leaders need real-time visibility into its health.

Moving forward, success hinges on being equipped with the insight needed to optimize processes and training, balance workloads and maximize ROI.

From after-the-fact reports to real-time insight

For years, the efforts to bring innovation to local government have focused on digital transformation, the process of moving paper processes online. Those gains were necessary, but simply digitizing doesn’t solve the growing executive challenge of demonstrating performance and anticipating problems.

Today’s city leaders need to know:

• Where bottlenecks are forming across departments.
• Whether service-level commitments are being met and why.
• Which projects are at risk before applicants escalate concerns.

When reporting depends on exports, manual cleanup or separate BI tools, the insight city and county leaders need is delayed, fragmented and difficult to trust. Leaders end up managing reactively when today’s local government environment demands proactive leadership.

How Avolve helps leaders proactively manage plan review

Forward-looking agencies are now treating reporting as table stakes core infrastructure, embedded directly into operational systems rather than layered on afterward.

This shift is reflected in how platforms like Avolve are supporting plan review processes.

Avolve Insights™ is a built-in analytics and reporting capability within its leading plan review platforms, DigEplan and ProjectDox. Instead of requiring agencies to stitch together data from multiple systems, Avolve Insights turns the activity teams already capture into live dashboards and council-ready reports.

For executive leaders, that means:

• Instant visibility into plan review performance without exports or spreadsheets.
• Early alerts when workloads spike or bottlenecks emerge.
• Clear, shared reporting for leadership teams, councils and boards.

By surfacing performance data as work happens, Avolve Insights helps leaders monitor the health of plan review to deliver community growth with precision.

Live dashboards and council-ready reports matter more than ever

Today, in an era of constrained budgets, increasingly strict SLAs and rising public expectations, local leaders cannot afford blind spots or laggy insights. Agencies that can clearly demonstrate performance, identify risks early and communicate progress with confidence are better positioned to earn council and community trust and ensure projects keep moving forward.

Learn more: Join the webinar

To learn how Avolve Insights is helping public-sector teams move from manual reporting to real-time executive intelligence, register for our upcoming 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.

Reserve your spot today to see how local government is finding the pulse of plan review