Accreditation process helps organization assess service and performance Matthew F. Villareale Fleet Management Division Chief Prince William County, Virginia Director, APWA Mid-Atlantic Chapter
he Department of Public Works in Prince William County strives to provide excellent customer service and meet the daily needs of our community. In an effort to assess our service and performance, the department took on the challenge of the accreditation process through APWA. Public Works is one of the largest departments in the County. We complete a wide variety of tasks from historic preservation, environmental protection, trash and recycling management, neighborhood improvement to providing services such as fleet, printing and cleaning services for our County Government. This diversity in tasks, services and responsibilities led the department to have eight unique cultures in its eight different divisions.
department business plan. This plan created goals, strategies and objectives that pull the divisions together toward a common departmentwide vision and mission. The plan was created based on feedback from employees throughout the department. The feedback was then organized and prioritized by a team of employees from all of the divisions. The business plan, which is in line with the County’s strategic plan, heralded a cultural shift in the department. Another valuable aspect of the accreditation process was the completion of the self assessment phase. It is said that starting is the hardest part of any project. For us, starting and completing the self assessment was the hardest and most
important step we took during the accreditation process. During this self assessment, the department took a hard look at its current practices to determine if they were adequate. We discovered we were fulfilling many of the applicable management practices, but we did not have written policies and practices, so we could not document our compliance. We also found many procedures and policies were based on memos from a supervisor. Through the years, those memos have been forgotten, lost or unfamiliar to employees who started after the memo was issued. As a direct result of the self assessment, we created a standard for uniformly documenting procedures
Through the accreditation process, staff was able to create formal bridges between these groups to create a department-wide culture. Cross-divisional teams worked on the first nine chapters and created department-wide policies and procedures. The teams also tackled the subject chapters with management practices that involved multiple divisions. As a result of this work, employees from separate divisions began to see how they were connected to the other employees within the department and how our work supported other groups. One of the most valuable achievements in the accreditation process was the creation of our 14 APWA Reporter
June 2012
Prince William County Public Works serves the entire county.
