News
BDA Hot Topic: Service Goals
by Kellee Lostaunau
 |
|
IAS Project Coordinator Kellee Lostaunau |
Introduction
One of the crucial subjects evaluated by International Accreditation Service (IAS) evaluators as part of the Building Department Accreditation (BDA) process—and one of the most commonly misunderstood by applicants—is the topic of service goals. During the process of accreditation, IAS examines the applicant building department’s handling of three distinct components of service for permitting, plan review and inspections: timeliness, quality and professionalism.
Service Goals for Timeliness
Timeliness is simply how long it takes to complete a particular service or component of service. Goals for timeliness are easier to establish for some services than others. For instance, the turnaround time set for an inspection to be completed might be measured from the time the inspection is requested until it is completed. Plan reviews are just slightly more complicated—there might be just one goal or there might be one timeliness goal set for an initial review and another goal set for a review of a corrected set of plans. A variety of factors can affect how long it takes for a permit to be issued: plans may need to be corrected and resubmitted and sometimes even submitted for a third time. A building department should not be penalized for the length of time it takes an applicant to correct and resubmit plans. So, in order to establish fair and realistic timeliness goals for permitting, the goals should be broken down into two separate parts: (1) the time it takes for an initial application to be entered into the queue for plan review and (2) the time it takes for a permit to be issued once plans are approved.
Service Goals for Quality
Quality can be thought of as a degree or grade of excellence. In order to define a goal for the degree or grade of excellence for a particular service, an acceptable error rate must first be established. It is difficult, however, to establish only one error rate because not all errors are created equal. For example, an inspection that misses a code violation related to life safety might be weighted more heavily than another type of error that did not directly affect life safety. For this reason, it is important to classify error types and designate error rate tolerances for types of each class.
One example may be to classify life-safety errors as “major” and the rest as “minor,” then establish acceptable error rates for each type. Perhaps a building department might decide that it is acceptable for 95 percent of plans sampled to contain no more than three minor errors, but that zero percent of plans sampled may contain any major errors.
There are different ways to classify errors—some might classify them as life-safety/non-life-safety and others might classify errors as structural/accessibility/plumbing, etc. The names of the categories are not important so long as the classifications are meaningful and the goals are measurable and attainable. Permitting errors might range from misspellings of names or addresses to incorrect coding for the type of permit requested. Only the building department can determine which types of errors can occur and which of those types are most important to minimize.
Service Goals for Professionalism
Professionalism encompasses the way staff represents the building department to stakeholders and citizens. Are staff members knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, responsive, courteous, etc.? In order to set goals for professionalism and measure performance, levels of professionalism first need to be quantified. A department might choose to rate professionalism from A (highest) through F (lowest), from 0-4 (with 4 being the highest), etc. Then, once professionalism has been quantified, feedback must proactively be sought from users of building department services on a regular basis. Service users should be asked to rank building department staff professionalism in various areas of service. Feedback can be requested by use of paper or web-based surveys, questionnaires placed on the permit counter, telephone surveys, or a combination thereof.
Establishing Goals in Conjunction with Stakeholders
The importance cannot be overstated of seeking the input of stakeholders—builder’s associations, contractors, homeowners and elected officials—in establishing goals for timeliness, quality and professionalism. The goal of any building department should be to assure a safe built environment while at the same time minimizing bureaucratic barriers to business; it makes sense to bring to the table everyone who has a stake in building department services to cooperatively establish operating goals while improving public perception.
Benefits of Establishing Service Goals and Measuring Performance
Once service goals have been established and proactive measures put in place to track performance, trends become apparent. One of the greatest benefits of setting and monitoring service goals is the hard data that is generated in the process—data that can be incredibly valuable for monitoring and managing operations. Training opportunities are identified, the need for additional staff or resources is documented, and problems are identified in the early stages. A culture of continuous improvement spreads throughout the organization as a result.
To learn more about quality assessment, internal audits or the Building Department Accreditation program, please visit our website.