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Continuous Improvement
New Hanover County’s dedicated team of public servants work each day to serve the community, respond to the needs of our citizens, lead the nation in innovation, and deliver the best value for taxpayer dollars. We pride ourselves on being the model of Good Governance and the Office of Strategy is focused on continuous improvement efforts that make our organization:
- Effective and efficient in all that we do
- Easy to do business with and consistent in how we do it
- Responsive and professional in our service
Process Improvements
Health and Human Services – Mailroom
Delays in the distribution of time-sensitive outgoing and incoming mail through the Health and Human Services mailroom were resulting in disruptions that prevented citizens from being able to receive services they were eligible for. Approximately 90 percent of the mail going through the mailroom was determined to be time-sensitive, making a process improvement crucial to ensure effectiveness. By creating efficiencies in the mailroom, staff was able to reduce the amount of time it took mail to reach its destination from 3 days to 1.5 hours, ensuring continued service without interruption for residents.
Link to NACo video for mailroom process improvement
Health and Human Services – Crisis Intervention Program
The Health and Human Services Crisis Intervention Program helps individuals and families who need financial assistance in a heating or cooling crisis. Inefficient processes in this program resulted in service providers not receiving payments from New Hanover County in a timely fashion, resulting is services being disrupted to the impacted household. Through a process improvement, the time span to pay a service provider through a check issuance was reduced from 21 days to 12 days. Additionally, electronic payments were also established, further reducing payment time to the provider to 24 hours. By creating efficiencies in this process, service providers received payment for services and our citizens’ risk of service disruption was eliminated.
Development Services – Building Permits
New Hanover County’s Development Services team was experiencing significant challenges with issuing building permits through EnerGov software in a timely manner. Through new simplified workflows and a supporting staffing pilot program, our permitting team was able to eliminate a backlog of 400 building permits in their queue which resulted in reducing the number of days it was taking staff to begin reviewing permits from 11 days to the day of submittal.