Austin was one of the fastest-growing US cities of the past few decades and is now among the 15 largest cities in the country.1 This kind of rapid growth can usher in countless challenges, including strains on the permitting and development process.
McKinsey Partner Drew Erdmann sat down with Jose Roig and Laura Huffman, two people who saw these challenges firsthand and led a transformation of the city’s site plan review process to improve efficiency, transparency, and the customer experience. From 2023 to 2025, Roig was the director for the Development Services Department in the city of Austin. Huffman is the founder of CivicSol, an economic- and workforce-development consulting firm, and in 2023 and 2024, she sat on the city management transition team for the city of Austin while a new mayor and interim city manager took charge.
Their conversation spanned how they built momentum for changes to the site plan review process, the initiatives and tactics that made the biggest impact for customers and staff alike, and how they measured progress.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Drew Erdmann: Why did the site plan review process matter for an incoming mayor in 2023?
Laura Huffman: Affordability has been the biggest policy issue in Austin for years. Within the conversation about affordability, the mayor was thinking hard about what levers are within the city’s control. The city doesn’t control interest rates or the price of groceries. But one focus area for the city was housing—and specifically housing inventory. The city was pulling a number of levers to address housing inventory, one of which was the speed and efficiency with which permits are issued.
Sometimes I joke that you could put a desk in front of City Hall and hand out permits, and people would still complain about the process. It is a universal local government challenge. And it had been a source of complaint in Austin for as long as any of us could remember.
Jose Roig: When I stepped into the role of the director in early 2023, the site plan review process was one of the most complex and fragmented systems in the city. There were so many departments, so many staff members involved in the process. And each person and department had different priorities and different interpretations of the very complex land development code. This code had been in place since the ’80s and had only undergone piecemeal updates over the years.
Despite this complexity, there were no standardized workflows. The coordination across people and groups was basically ad hoc. It wasn’t really coordination at all. And the technology wasn’t standardized either—everyone used different platforms, many of which were outdated and poorly integrated.
In listening to the stakeholders and the developers, we noticed that they were lost in the process and it was taking too much time. The average review time was almost a year per application. About 80 percent of applicants reported submitting their applications three or more times to resolve review comments.2 Some people were waiting 18 months or more for a permit.
It was not just a technical problem; it was a cultural issue. Many of the people involved had a compliance-driven mindset: “This is the way we’ve always done it because we need to make sure the code is met.” They saw it as a way to protect the public, and I understand that, but they weren’t even communicating with the customer. We needed to build a customer-centric culture. To do that, we needed alignment that the primary customer is the applicant. And then we needed staff to see themselves as the main drivers for these initiatives.
This is what we were facing when we started this process—and why it was a priority for the mayor.
Drew Erdmann: How did the team build momentum and rally support in the broader community and among stakeholders?
Laura Huffman: We had a few advantages coming into this that helped the team build momentum. The first was that the mayor himself was framing the issue using his big megaphone—talking about how this fit into the conversation about affordability and housing. The second advantage we had was an interim city management team that was told to fix broken things and do it fast. The interim city manager matched the mayor’s urgency. The third advantage was that we had leadership—including Jose—that didn’t have historical baggage. We didn’t have front-end alignment problems, which allowed us to move quickly.
But we did have to overcome some cynicism among stakeholders. There was a feeling among some of “We already tried this two years ago.” So we acknowledged that, while there may have been good faith efforts in the past, they had lacked the analytical rigor required to solve this problem. We were approaching it differently this time—looking under the hood and using analytics and real process mapping.
We also took engagement very seriously. The department worked with a lot of stakeholders. The mayor attended the first stakeholder engagement meeting and made it very clear that we were going to listen and gather feedback at the front end, and at the same time, we were busy making sure that we understood the current process. You don’t have to give weight to every single comment, but you have to give weight to the idea that we can do better.
Drew Erdmann: How did you approach change management, and what were some early changes you made?
Jose Roig: First of all, we needed to know where the pain points were. We assessed the experience for both customers and staff under the current process. It was a real eye-opener because we saw that nobody was happy. Everybody on both sides was frustrated most of the way through the process (exhibit).
So how do you fix that? You need a shared vision with customers and staff. And not only that, but there needs to be urgency, momentum, and transparency.
Transparency was the key to building momentum around the recommendations. We started by presenting the diagnostic. We engaged every director of every department, empowering them to make decisions and support and listen to the staff—who probably understood the current process best of all. We had a continuous improvement mentality; as we went through the process, we didn’t wait for it to be perfect. We established KPIs and delivered quick wins and tested the solutions with stakeholders at every step. Leaders didn’t build this on their own.
One major complaint from customers was that they never knew where they were in the process after submitting an application. So someone came up with the idea of a pizza tracker. If Domino’s Pizza can tell you where your pizza is, why can’t we tell you where your application is?
Of course, we ran into challenges building these systems—challenges with the technology, challenges with outdated systems, some of which they’re still working on. But we kept moving and making progress.
Laura Huffman: I can’t really say enough about the pizza tracker. It just made sense to people. Even if you were mad about where you were in the process, you at least knew where you were. We brought in McKinsey for outside expertise in the process mapping and real performance improvement from the grassroots, which was a huge help. Many of the previous efforts were DIY, but we made it clear to people that we weren’t making this part of their job on top of everything else.
As we were looking out across the organization for where big issues were getting stuck, we observed that the organization was thinking about its vertical responsibilities. And we were trying to institutionalize the idea that some problems must be solved at the enterprise level—because the most important, hardest problems involve cross-functional teamwork. But many of the players worked in other departments and had other reporting structures. We had to think about how to activate this concept of enterprise leadership, so we underpinned these process changes with management changes.
And, Jose, I think that’s what you’re talking about with cultural shifts. We not only wanted to tackle this issue once and for all, but we also needed to update management structures to keep pace with the process changes that we were identifying.
Then, as early wins were rolling in, we started to do a better job of diagnosing the issues when something was moving slowly. It wasn’t always the department’s fault; sometimes it was that the engineering firms hadn’t provided review comments. So when people were calling and complaining about the process, we were able to assign responsibility and accountability in the right places.
But we should also say that, back to Jose’s point about the complicated existing land development code, we had to establish from the start that we weren’t setting out to simplify the code. That would take two or three years. It was our job to ensure that the development happens within the regulations that are in place.
We didn’t want to pour new technology on a bad process. We needed to fix the process to know what we needed.
Impact summary: The Austin–McKinsey partnership
Austin’s site plan review process—for approving new developments and ensuring they comply with local codes and regulations—was extremely complex. It involved more than 1,400 potential steps, touching more than 250 staff members from 11 city departments. As Austin’s leaders thought about addressing the city’s need for affordable housing, the site plan review process emerged as a key area of opportunity.
In this excerpt from Drew Erdmann’s interview with two of Austin’s leaders at the time, they reflect on the city’s work with McKinsey to address this challenge.
Drew Erdmann: Why was McKinsey brought in to support the city of Austin in reviewing and updating the site plan review process?
Laura Huffman: The new mayor knew that addressing a challenge of this scale would require an outside perspective. So we engaged McKinsey for an in-depth diagnostic of the current review process. Importantly, McKinsey engaged the customers of the process—the site plan applicants—from the start. Through a customer experience survey and then facilitating workshops with applicants and representatives of critical stakeholder groups, McKinsey helped us identify pain points and high-impact areas for improvement. This openness to real feedback helped get to the right answers and reset the city’s relationship with its customers. And McKinsey designed its diagnostic of our internal processes as a sprint with real analytics to get the work and initial cultural shift underway. Once that was done, the city engaged McKinsey to support implementing the recommendations to improve efficiency and customer experience.
Jose Roig: There were efforts in the past to improve the process, but they lacked rigor and didn’t engage the staff. So bringing McKinsey in was critical. McKinsey worked with us from the start. They not only helped us diagnose the challenges but worked with us side by side to figure out the multiyear road map to transform how we work. When we shifted to implementation, McKinsey coached our leaders and staff to work together across our department silos to find solutions and learn from each other. They helped us begin to build real continuous improvement capabilities and culture in our site plan review teams. The results were fast and striking: The city saw 50 percent reduction in initial review turnaround time and update turnaround time within months. And our customers said the city had never been so responsive, transparent, or innovative before.
Drew Erdmann: How exactly did you build the pizza tracker?
Jose Roig: We discovered that the enterprise system we had couldn’t actually support what we wanted to do.
Laura Huffman: We were in line to get brand new technology, but then Jose came in and rightfully said to pause. We didn’t want to pour new technology on a bad process. We needed to fix the process to know what we needed.
Jose Roig: Right, so in the meantime, we put some solutions in place because the tracker had to be built internally. The first thing the staff did was to create a system where, when comments came in for the site plan, they were emailed to the applicants. So at least there was communication in the interim and applicants could work on addressing those comments.
Then one of the requirements for the new enterprise system was that it could support a transparent tracker showing where applications are in the process. It works pretty well already, but once they have the new enterprise systems, it’ll be even easier.
But the most important part was that the customers knew the challenges that we were facing. We were not hiding anything. We said, “We cannot get to a perfect solution right now, but we can do this.”
This transparency was critical. Our leaders didn’t build this on their own. They actually engaged the stakeholders.
Drew Erdmann: That’s a great example of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. What were some of the indicators of improvement? How did you know that you were making progress?
Laura Huffman: The process times. Things just started moving quicker. And Jose and the team were really smart about reporting those improvements. The minute we started seeing reduced processing times, we started publicizing it. And that communication and transparency, especially with the stakeholders, were really important. We let them come along this journey with us. It showed the public that we were working hard on a complex problem. And while the bigger solutions will take time, there are wins to be had.
There’s always going to be factors unique to a particular piece of land—such as height restrictions, zoning, and flooding—but if AI can get you three-quarters of the way there, that’s a benefit for the community.
Jose Roig: Because we kept the stakeholders involved, they were able to provide feedback to the mayor and the city manager, saying, “Hey, you know what? It’s working.” And when the staff see that the stakeholders are working with you on the solution and you’re in it together, that’s encouraging.
Drew Erdmann: You mentioned technology, but a topic that’s probably on most people’s minds is the impact of artificial intelligence. What role did AI play in your efforts?
Jose Roig: We brought in a company with a system that uses AI to review plans. During the pilot, we noticed that by teaching the closed system all the complex regulations of the land development code, we could reduce the typical workload by up to 80 percent and move very quickly. There’s always going to be factors unique to a particular piece of land—such as height restrictions, zoning, and flooding—but if AI can get you three-quarters of the way there, that’s a benefit for the community. We were the first city in the United States to use the company for this purpose.3
Laura Huffman: The other thing about AI is that local governments are really resource-constrained. And the ability to raise property taxes year over year is capped. So AI is another way to add resources in a way that recognizes those budget constraints.
Drew Erdmann: Stepping back, what advice do you have for city, state, or municipal leaders who are thinking about tackling the challenges tied to permitting, streamlining, and reform?
Laura Huffman: If there is energy to tackle this issue, then getting political, management, and departmental alignment very early is key. The mayor was talking about this in his newsletters, which are widely read in this community. Keeping that drumbeat going and creating that alignment gave us room to do rigorous work.
The second thing I would say is, in general, I don’t think a DIY solution will work. Getting an outside set of eyes involved in process mapping matters.
Finally, in most places in the country, these processes cross departments. You have to think about how to tackle that enterprise management question.
These are all things you have to do at the front end to set yourself up to succeed.
Jose Roig: You need to start with a clear diagnostic. You need to know the pain points, from both the staff and the customer perspectives. That’s going to be an eye-opener. And then make sure everybody’s on the same page. You build that coalition across departments, across the political leadership, so you can actually get this going.
You also need to invest. If you invest in AI, then you have to use it. Leaders need to invest their time. But you also have to invest in your staff and empower them to make these decisions—and then cultivate a continuous improvement mentality. The work doesn’t end after a couple wins. It’s a long-term effort.
