News and views about general Public Sector topics

Get the benefits of a 311 System, without the expense

Think of PSR as a 311 system that covers all of the U.S. & Canada Minus the large and expensive Call Center, and the hard-to-manage Knowledge Base. In a nutshell, here's a brief video about what we do. Here is the ultra-simple process for responding to online PSR-generated Service Requests We take non-emergency service requests from anyone in North America where PSR is

Customer Service & Website Branding Consistency

When adding a full-function (3rd Party) Customer Service, or 311 system, to a Customer-facing website, Service Providers insist on consistent website branding. That's why we offer the services of our highly creative Design Specialist to assemble a widget image that blends perfectly with your existing branding, including perfect color matching, and the use of vector graphics to allow unlimited

Process Standardization. Marching in Step?

In previous posts, we examined the problem of variation in business process implementation. In this post, we will look at one of the solutions to that problem - process standardization. Please picture in your mind's eye a group of soldiers matching in step at a parade to music played by a band. What makes the variation by the marching soldiers and the band minimal? Standard work describes

PSR Featured in GCN by Stephanie Kanowitz

A big thank you to Stephanie Kanowitz for her excellent article in the April 28th edition of GCN. Stephanie focuses on the multi-jurisdiction functionality that enables Public Sector clients to give their constituents branded Apps, while enabling communications between jurisdictions, with no IT involvement. Unlike most service request systems, PSR covers all topics and all departments, rather

Overtake Your Backlog

From Ian Lucas, Co-Owner, Public Service Request Inc. Your Service Request Backlog that is. Unfortunately it's true that the majority of Public Service Providers don't have good processes in place for prioritizing, grouping, merging and resolving both internally and externally generated Service Requests, to overtake your backlog. Step one is reorganizing your business processes so that all

Dave Robbins Press Release. Official U.S. Announcement.

It's official. PSR LLC has arrived in Madison WI with Dave Robbins at the helm. Please take a few moments to find out what the buzz is all about. See you next week at the ICMA Conference in Seattle. Booth 101.

Fresh And Invigorated from the APWA Congress in Phoenix

Sharing a booth at the APWA Congress, with strategic business ally Rival Solutions, Dave Robbins, President of Public Service Request LLC was very pleased to discuss and present the integration of Rival Solutions' RUBIX Road and Sidewalk Performance Evaluation mobile technology, with PSR's Citizen Service Request cloud-based system. For Clients who use PSR to establish standardized work

Proud Sponsor of Public Sector Enterprise ICT Conference London

PSR are pleased to announce that we are sponsors of the forthcoming Public Sector Enterprise ICT Conference (PSEICT) taking place on the 10th of Nov 2015, at the Russell Hotel in London. This is the UK’S most prestigous public sector ICT conference and exhibition for senior decision makers across all functions of government, and we are proud to support it. If you are planning to attend the

Collaborative Service Delivery (Fixing The Disconnect)

Transparency, accountability, engagement (and all those other buzz words that we perhaps overuse), have a downside - heightened Public expectations for improved Service Delivery. The Public sees, ever more clearly, that we are not being cost and resource efficient in getting this done. Collaboration as an approach to the delivery of local services, focuses on sharing costs and benefits by two or

Want to see our cascading widgets?

Imagine being able to add Customer Service functionality, configured to the topic of each of your web pages? Sounds tedious, complicated and expensive? With PSR's cascading widgets, it's none of the above. Take a look at one of our Client's website and you see how they've achieved this. You can go even further and customize each widget image to match its associated web page. The Public can get

The Personal Price of Public Service

In this post, we take a break from public service efficiency and effectiveness to share the very moving personal story of Dr Allen Ault who served as the State of Georgia's Chief Correction Officer until 1995. Please watch and read excerpts from his interview here. Please share your thoughts. As a public official, has your work taken its toll on your personal life? If so, in what way? How have

Reliability is the key quality success factor…

I would like you to imagine that your journey to work last week took you on average 27 minutes - not bad reliability you might think -I'll take that. However what if I added that the following detail about journey times: Day Journey (in mins) Monday 15 Tuesday 35 Wednesday 20 Thursday 50 Friday 15 The wide variation in journey times would probably

CoPQ? What on earth is that?!?

When seeking to measure and compare the performance of employees, many public service provides often focus on efficiency measure. To illustrate, take a moment or two to ponder this hypothetical scenario: Given the same resources (time, tools, training, etc), one of the workers in your team (let's call him Bob), on average, repairs 10 potholes in a day whilst his colleague Billy repairs only 7

Can we have some change please?

'Nurse, how's the mayor who swallowed those quarters doing? 'No change yet...' **cheesy grin** OK, that's the pun out of the way, down to serious business. "Nothing is certain except for death and taxes". That famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin highlights the inevitability of change. So it's to be expected that the world in which the public service provider operates will change.

Hey, how are you/we doing?

When it comes to obtaining feedback on their performance, many public service providers primarily turn to those citizens who have consumed their service via customer satisfaction surveys for example. It seems to make sense – after all, who best to comment on the service than those who have experienced it directly? However that approach ignores the differences between outputs (the end results of a

Disaster Recovery – An Approach to Managing Volunteers

Disaster Recovery from ICMA International: In the course of conducting after-action reports following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) noticed a common theme: unprecedented numbers of spontaneous volunteers, most of whom were not affiliated with an established volunteer agency, streamed into

So what’s your story?

As we highlighted in a previous post, the value delivered by public services is often opaque. As result, a rationale or ‘story’ needs to exist to justify the provision of funding for the public service provider. Every now and again, this rationale is put in the spotlight and re-examined by actors and events outside the control of the public service provider. For example, when a high-profile

How much is that…

...doggy in the window (Woof! Woof!) The one with the waggley tail (you'll be humming that for the remainder of the day now, won't you). Our focus in this post, though, is not on cuddly canines, rather it's on the value of public services. Unlike private service whose value is often determined by whether they are profitable or not (in other words, do they generate more revenue than it costs to

Can you afford not to?

From Niyi Ogunbiyi, (Director, Change Enablers Ltd) In our previous post, we made the case that public service providers needed to do more than simply measure customer satisfaction metrics. In order to understand why customers are satisfied or otherwise, it is necessary to understand the end-to-end service delivery lifecycle and to that end we introduced the “Service Excellence Capability