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Rochester Hills Seeks Building Department Accreditation
The City of Rochester Hills, located about 20 miles north of Detroit, Michigan, is a suburban neighborhood community of over 68,000 with a good mix of commercial and retail businesses. The Building Department handles some 4,600 permit requests each year and performs over 13,000 inspections. Over the last four years, the Building Department has implemented new operational processes and inspection procedures designed to ensure continuous customer service improvements.
In early 2006, Scott Cope, Director of Building and Ordinance Compliance for the City of Rochester Hills, attended an International Accreditation Service (IAS) Building Department Accreditation (BDA) lead evaluator training session to learn more about the benefits of accreditation and to compare his organization’s efforts to the new national standard. “I was interested in knowing what the industry experts think constitutes a quality building department operation—and how our organization compared,” Cope commented.
Cope quickly found that the Rochester Hills Building Department ranked high on many elements of the national standard, and with a few additional improvements they would be set to go through the IAS BDA process. “With our culture of improvement and customer service already in place, it was just a logical step for us to go through the IAS BDA program evaluation to determine how we rate as compared to a national standard,” Cope recalled.
Over the course of several months, Rochester Hills responded to the IAS BDA information questionnaire, finding a number of opportunities for further improvement along the way, particularly in the area of defined metrics. The IAS team offered several best practice tools designed to facilitate and track improvements, while identifying other areas of possible efficiency in customer service, plan reviews and inspections.
In the case of customer service, the Rochester Hills Building Department previously measured customer service through surveys or random interviews. The new method calls for regular once-a-week calls to random customers. The department now regularly talks with contractors in the field about its permit and inspection services.
“We also developed a performance measure to show how we’re doing as far as length of time to complete plan reviews,” Cope said. “We’ve always had a goal of 15 days to get plan reviews completed, but we didn’t have any way to track what percentage actually hits that mark. Now we do.”
The department also tracks the percentage of errors in plan reviews, and inspection approval and rejection rates, and then evaluates whether additional training is necessary.
The Rochester Hills Building Department recently underwent its final accreditation evaluation by IAS and is waiting to hear if it will receive accreditation.
“Regardless of the results, we’ve learned so much and come so far in the last year by just going through the process,” said Cope. “We now have the tools to drive improvements within our organization and ensure efficiency while giving our city government officials and the community confidence in our ability to provide service with efficiency.”