There are things that government does that routinely catch the eye of its constituents — raising taxes, banning chickens and installing roundabouts to mention a few.

The phrase “process improvement” might not sound like an eye-grabber, but an effort is underway at the courthouse to improve service for county residents.

Commissioner Ben Kafferlin said during Monday’s work session that when he came into office six years ago there were “quite a few things we learned very quickly,” including that there was a lack of documentation to assist in succession planning” — (when one employee leaves, and another comes on).

“Institutional knowledge was walking out the door,” he said, causing “continuity issues. It’s a simple fact that elections cause intentional change in the system.”

He explained that some past decisions by boards of commissioners are noted nowhere but the meeting minutes and that there were several places where county government had “swayed” from the county code.

There was a “lack of documentation and a lack of a way to record it,” Kafferlin said, which resulted in “no real good way to do root cause analysis and investigation into complaints.”

The effort to build that infrastructure started in earnest at the beginning of 2021.

He called it an attempt “to document procedures…. We want to be consistent in how we perform our work, so we can prove… to the public that we are consistent in how we treat people.”

There are other procedural benefits as well — potential automation and less paper and paper pushing. There are multiple avenues for the processes and procedures to be audited or checked for consistency.

The formal name for this effort is a Government Management System and the specific standards are aimed to “bring the experience of business management to local government,” Kafferlin said.

Developing all the documents needed to outline how the county does that it should do will take time. Certain county departments are further along than others — Elections, the Commissioners office, Human Resources and Fiscal as well as 911 have some elements completed.

“No department yet is 100 percent on,” Kafferlin said. “All of them have been trained to some degree to start working in that direction.”

He highlighted a litany of benefits to the effort — improved quality, identifying how to do something consistently, easier cross training, legal certainty.

“It should reduce our revisiting of issues,” he said, as well as “more successful employee onboarding” and a reduction in “ineffective expenditures.”

Chief Clerk Pam Matve has been driving the effort, Kafferlin said.

What happens if she retires or the commissioner’s office changes composition?

The commissioners role has been to oversee this at a high level, approving policy and letting county staff dictate the work processes in their office.

The policies and procedures approved by this board “would last until changed by a future board,” Kafferlin said.

“This is a quality assurance program,” Solicitor Nathaniel Schmidt added.