Best Practices

Presentation by Steve Mitas

Tuesday February 6, 2007
NERC Conference
Mohegan Sun Resort

Summary: This presentation addresses two specific points of discussion considering best practices for Public Housing Agencies – Workflow Tracking Tools and Business Continuity Planning.

I. What is Workflow and Workflow Tracking Tools?

Workflow is a term that describes tasks, procedural steps, organizations or people involved, required input and output information and tools needed to complete each step in a business process.

Workflow tracking tools help define the workflow of an organization making it more automated, transparent and structured. These tools give you ability to create, manage and optimize your business.

To illustrate a typical procedure that could benefit from workflow automation, we will examine the annual recertification process. It is a multi-step process where completion of one task depends on conclusion of another task. Commonly, a number of employees are involved, each responsible for their assigned task expected to have it completed within a certain period of time. Even a complex process like the one described can easily be mapped into a workflow chart:

The main advantage of a workflow chart is to make the process more understandable and easy to follow from both management and employees’ perspective. Most employees perform better if they know up front what is expected from them. In addition, it makes cross-training and training new hires much simpler and consistent as every step in the process is clearly defined. Lastly, it allows management to check the process at any stage, identify possible bottlenecks and help eliminate them.

There are software solutions available from various companies, e.g. Microsoft, Savvion, iMarkup, Cebos, iGrafx, Quask etc. By documenting your work process within one of these software applications, you will get the following benefits:
       II. Users are notified of tasks that must fulfill
      III. Each task is clearly defined to ensure consistent work
      IV. Management is able to track timeliness of task completion

V. Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning is the process that defines the procedures employed to ensure timely and orderly resumption of an organization’s business cycle through its ability to execute plans with minimal or no interruption to time-sensitive business or service operations.

What would you do in case of a natural disaster considering your IT? Do you have a plan in place to face it? Although every aspect of your aspect needs to be considered, we will focus on IT infrastructure in this presentation.

Rapid restart of your business and alternative location with appropriate IT hardware and software must be in place. Consider the following:
      - Space for servers, security of that place and possibility to extend it if necessary
      - Extra hardware and software, upgrades, patches and frequency of replacement
      - Backup of latest data from live servers
      - Extra phones, internet connection, etc...

A different approach would be a hosted system which can also be a more economic alternative for your organization. You would be sharing hardware and software systems, internet infrastructure and IT labor costs with other agencies. Therefore, your business would be less vulnerable to disasters because your servers will be in a different geographical location and more cost-effective as upgrades to the system will be taken care of automatically by trained IT experts of the hosting company.