Client: Carroll County Department of Public Works (DPW)
Location: Carroll County, Maryland
For more than two decades, EA has provided technical and professional services support to Carroll County through a variety of projects including evaluation, planning, design, permitting, asset management configuration and implementation, business process analysis, budgeting support, workforce analysis, emergency response, and construction phase services. Focus areas have included:
Performance Audit
EA completed a comprehensive performance audit spanning the nine bureaus of the Carroll County DPW. The performance audit focused on seven categories: organization, staffing, short/long-term planning, agreements/policies/procedures, operations, performance measures, and technology.
The result of the audit provided the County with discrete findings and resolution action items for both the Department as a whole and for the individual Bureaus to be incorporated into the following year’s budget and planning. The audit consisted of developing questionnaires, facilitating workshops, and fact-checking/trothing findings. In addition to the report for this specific Department, EA prepared an appendix that can serve as a template for the County to repeat this type of performance audit in the future or in other Departments without having to re-create the process, which should save both time and money.
Business Analysis
EA led workshops with both the water and wastewater groups to capture all existing documentation regarding the Utilities’ processes, procedures, workflows, assets, and applications for the recording of service requests, employee assignments, data collection, maintenance, reporting, and analysis of asset data.
Workforce Analysis
Workforce was ranked as the top priority for the majority of County managers in the audit, and they desired an analysis that covered skills, levels, training, retention, succession, retirement, morale, compensation, and the necessary tools the workforce needed to complete its job(s) effectively. Our analysis took a 360-degree approach by gathering information to understand perspectives from all staff levels/positions on what is the minimum requirements versus desired for optimum performance as well as benchmarking against other similar local government departments and organizations. The analysis concluded that while there were some areas where the County was excelling, such as morale and technology tools, for some Bureaus there were other areas of concern, such as 40% of the staff being eligible for retirement in the next 5 years and numerous open staffing requisitions with a difficulty to fill. EA developed recommended action items with consideration to reallocation of resources, overall budget, and maximized use of employee knowledge to assist the County in making decisions for the coming years.
Workflow Optimization
EA developed data-entry templates and hosted a series of workshops to gather County information and preferences for categories such as employees, contractors, materials, equipment, service requests, work orders, inspections, and reports. Using Cityworks’ LGDM templates for many of the categories was an efficient way for the County to ensure all the typical areas for a municipality’s water and sewer utilities were captured without having to spend effort in development. EA used the information collected from the workshops to configure the Cityworks asset management software to meet the Bureau of Utilities’ needs.
End User Training
Custom training materials were developed for classroom-style training. The training materials were focused on the end-user experience and covered the following: key terminology, logging in, user interface, service request generation, work order assignment and completion, inspection initiation and completion, map user interface, reporting, and customization of user inboxes. EA provided live demonstrations of Cityworks configurations along the way during user workshops to ensure users were familiar with the Cityworks interface and then performed two initial trainings for 20 end users, with a follow-up training to re-enforce the user understanding.
