Business Process Redesign Update

BPR update- Juneau is implementing this week!

On April 18th, Juneau District Office (JDO) conducted their soft opening of Business Process Redesign (BPR). In the morning JDO staff were engaged with reading through and discussing the How We guide to ensure understanding, reviewed processes and procedures, and ensured an understanding of how to use the PathOs management tool. The afternoon was spent placing tasks in the assigned tracks in PathOs, caring for customers, retrieving and disposing of information from PathOs, and much more.

Juneau has worked really hard in preparing for their implementation date which as positioned them to be successful! They have two phone numbers for customers to call, worked diligently on their Readiness Task List, completed staffing plans to cover the three customer access points into DPA, buddy systems were in place, completed weekly calls with C!A, identified mail blitz times, conducted same day interviewing/service, considered office layout and workstation positioning, chose which staff and managers to begin in which process teams, completed full training of staff, etc.

Juneau went live in PathOs at 2 pm on Monday and caseworkers began claiming cases that had been entered into PathOs by staff over the weekend. By noon on Tuesday, the office had worked 31 cases, approving or denying 28 for a completion rate of 90% and pending 3. Three additional cases were cleared. The team had been given a goal of completing 40 recerts on Tuesday, and as of mid-day, 16 were worked with 14 being approved or denied and clearing 1 for a total of 15. This is in addition to keeping up with lobby traffic with an average wait time of 20 minutes per client.

Also of note, Ketchikan numbers still look impressive! The numbers for Ketchikan from April 8-14 show total cases worked 569; total worked to completion (approved or denied) 495 for 87%; total pended 74; and total cases cleared was 100 (cleared means another PathOs entry was "automagically" bundled with an entry that was worked so essentially 2 PathOs entries were linked and worked concurrently by one staff). Although Ketchikan didn't meet their goal of completing 62 recerts per day, they averaged just over 45 per day. However, prior to the implementation of BPR and PathOs, it is unlikely that this number of recerts would have been completed otherwise so the new process has us moving in the right direction! Having real-time access to where the work is in the office (lobby, phones, non-lobby) and being able to reassign workers quickly to meet the needs of the workload has thus far proven to be effective.

On Wednesday, April 20th, the first day of a shared calendar for non-lobby clients within Juneau and Ketchikan! More information to come on this and how it works since Southeast is working out the kinks.

Congratulations to both Juneau and Ketchikan for taking the first steps!