Process Improvement

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Syracuse Winter Weather Operations

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In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.

Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.

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Introducing SYRCityline- transforming resident engagement and quality of service.

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Cityline has always been a portal to communicate with the residents, understand their concerns and find ways to address them, but a strong program is only successful if it continues to meet the needs for which it was intended, and for that, it has to be relevant, easy to use, and efficient.

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Managing Our Public Space With Permits

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So much of city life in Syracuse and in other cities operates in what is known as the “right-of-way,” which is space that is maintained and regulated for public use. Regulating the public right-of-way helps to make sure infrastructure is safe and usable.

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Process Mapping: A Tool With Many Uses

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A process map is a tool using a flowchart to illustrate the flow, people, as well as inputs, actions, and outputs of the process in a clear and detailed way. A good process map will reflect the work that is actually done within a given process, not what the intended or imagined workflow might entail. This means in order to build a good process map you should be talking to and learning from the folks that use the process every day, not just the people that oversee the process.

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Pilots: Prepare for Launch

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Although it might not always seem obvious, there is a special place in the world for pilots, and they are especially helpful in organizations that don’t have a large number of expendable resources required to take on big financial or public-facing risks. Whether you’re a curious resident or a fellow local government worker, understanding the value in not only trying new ideas but also testing them out, is important.

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Rethinking Personnel Processes: From Hiring to Retiring

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Rethinking Personnel Processes: From Hiring to Retiring

Personnel requisition and employee update processes are vital to ensuring that new employees can be hired, current employees can retire, and any other employment status changes can be processed in an accurate and timely manner. Through mapping the process and keeping benchmarks of our progress on this project, API is trying to identify every possible place where process changes could be made.