Over the past year, the quality of life project has sought to understand what direction our residents want to see the city drive in by asking “What matters most to your quality of life?”. The idea here is that the city is currently in a car in the middle of a parking lot with 360 degrees of directions to go in. The car is made of numbers, and the parking lot is made of the stories we hear from residents every day. By learning more about quality of life from constituent perspectives, we hoped to narrow down from 360degrees to just a few roads to choose to drive down.
Process Mapping: A Tool With Many Uses
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.
Sentiment analysis of social media shows how to address vaccine hesitancy in Syracuse
As more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine become available in the US, communities across the country have begun encountering vaccine hesitancy – sectors of the population that have access to doses but that express doubts, skepticism, or concerns. The ability to understand where that hesitancy comes from, and how to address it, could mean the difference between achieving herd immunity early or enduring many more months of the pandemic.
Prioritizing Equity for the City's Urban Forest Master Plan
Pilots: Prepare for Launch
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.
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.
Implementing the Project Intake Process
Travel Request Submissions go Digital
In 2018 our former Director of Innovation started a program over the summer aimed at changing the innovative culture in City Hall with the aspirations of identifying and executing a process improvement project that was meaningful and would impact a number of departments. The API office's ideation luncheon sparked the interest of many and we got a variety of ideas and suggestions.