City of Houston

HIGHLIGHT 01

DON retreat: listening to the team

The Department of Neighborhoods retreat brought staff together for team bonding, collaboration, and expectations for the next fiscal year. I created a Power BI dashboard to help leadership understand staff feedback about the experience and their sense of clarity about divisional roles.

I used rating distributions and summary gauges to show the survey results, then word clouds to make themes in the written feedback easier to explore. The accompanying report records that 100% of respondents rated their overall experience positively. Feedback also pointed to interest in cross-divisional training and opportunities to work together.

The report describes the before-and-after role-confidence questions as being collected after the retreat. These are staff reflections on perceived change, rather than an independently measured change in performance.

HIGHLIGHT 02

Turning the findings into two leadership reports

Alongside the dashboard, I wrote a detailed DON Retreat Report and a one-page summary. The detailed report explains the retreat objectives, survey questions, analysis methods, key insights, and recommendations. The one-pager brings the purpose, key findings, and workgroup participation into a format leadership can review quickly.

Writing for both levels of detail helped me translate the same analysis for different reading needs: a concise overview for immediate discussion and a fuller explanation of how the findings were developed. Recommendations included exploring cross-divisional training and following up on staff perceptions over time.

HIGHLIGHT 03

Excel reporting: from multiple refreshes to one

I created reporting workbooks for multiple City of Houston departments contributing data to a program within DON. The first version brought separate departmental sheets into a master workbook through individual queries, but staff had to refresh multiple pages to update the reporting.

For the next fiscal year, I combined the source forms into one master query sheet and used XLOOKUP to pull the numbers into the reporting layout. Staff could then update the linked workbook data with a single refresh. This made gathering contributions from other departments easier to manage while keeping the reporting format familiar.

HIGHLIGHT 04

Emergency coordination: keeping key information together

I built an emergency dashboard to bring key departmental information and designated rosters into one place. The HERT Calculator view lets users select a department, review its Tier 2 or Tier 3 employee count and selection requirement, and access the corresponding employee list.

The focus was making the relevant information easier to find across divisions. The figures shown here are an example from the original dashboard, not a current staffing roster.

HIGHLIGHT 05

SharePoint: a central data workspace

The department needed a central place for its information and data resources. I created a data subsite within the department SharePoint site, embedded dashboards I had built, and organized access to useful data tools and materials.

I also worked as a SharePoint administrator. This work connected the analysis itself with the practical question of how colleagues would find and use it in their day-to-day work.

HIGHLIGHT 06

A glossary colleagues can navigate like a dictionary

I built a DON Data Glossary within SharePoint to make shared definitions easier to find. I learned to use page anchors and linked the alphabetical navigation to specific locations on the page, creating a digital dictionary.

This gave colleagues a way to jump directly to a term instead of scrolling through the entire page, supporting a more consistent understanding of the language used in departmental work.

HIGHLIGHT 07

Learning Power Apps through an intern timesheet

I learned Power Apps by building an app for interns to clock in and out. The interface centered on straightforward Punch In and Punch Out actions, giving me a practical way to explore app design around a real administrative need.

This view shows the app during development in Power Apps Studio.

HIGHLIGHT 08

Power Automate: connecting recurring tasks

I created Power Automate flows for recurring administrative tasks, including matching-grant response emails, event-calendar processes, form-response notifications, and an intern timesheet approval flow.

These examples show how I explored automation across Microsoft tools to support repeatable workflows. The image is a record of flows I created; it does not imply that every flow is currently active.