The Challenge:  An agency’s backlog and turnover resulted in a 47-day average response time for open records requests when policy and legislation demanded a 10-day response time.  

What Good Looks Like:  A reengineered business process that receives and processes requests reliably in less than 10 days while ensuring that all decisions are appropriate, and that media, FOIA, and sensitive information requests are handled with the requisite time and diligence needed for quality outcomes.  

The Approach:  A combined ReEngine and employee project team defined what good looked like for the open records function.  They mapped the steps of the process, capturing good ideas and possible solutions along the way.  ReEngine analyzed the office’s data and presented a gap analysis to the team and their leadership.  Opportunities to streamline the work with checklists, decision templates, and exemplar cases helped to establish standard work.  ReEngine designed a dashboard that made the flow of work visible and manageable.  Contingencies for difficult, but frequently encountered, situations were established.  The key constraint (i.e. the release decision) was identified, measured, strengthened, and managed.  Work quality was assessed and assured.  Redaction was simplified and records retention went paperless.  Solution-ideas contributed by staff and ReEngine were woven into a reengineered business process.  The new process, and its companion SOP, was validated by leadership and piloted by the team before full implementation.  

The Results:  The agency’s response time dropped to 9.3 days on average.  Challenging requests were identified during initial triage and then carefully managed by disclosure officers.  Standard work reduced the cognitive load of disclosure officers and made it easier for team-members to achieve more with less effort.  The error rate fell to an all-time low.  Team-member confidence rose, especially among new employees.  

The Team: David Johnson, ReEngine’s Chief Operating Officer, managed the team to success while developing the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the situation. Alfredo Mycue, the Director of Strategy at ReEngine, facilitated most of the engagements and supervised the reengineering of the process. Brad Frailicks, one of ReEngine’s senior analysts, led the effort to capture the process in value stream maps. The whole combined project team launched the new process and presented all deliverables to agency leadership and key stakeholders.