Teacher Standards and Practices Commission
250 Division St NE
Salem OR 97301
/July 18-20, 2012
ITEM: /REPORT ON LICENSURE ISSUANCE/CUSTOMER SERVICE
ACTION: / INFORMATION ITEMINFORMATION: / We are now into the annual “busy season” for the licensing staff. This is an update on licensing workload, including a comparison of the current year, as compared to this same week during the past two years. This information item includes a description of our current challenges, as well as the steps we are taking to address both our back-log and customer service hurdles.
Licensing Section Work Product Comparison:
This is a comparison of statistics for the licensing team, comparing the current year against July data for both 2010 and 2011. This side-by-side comparison involves data from the second week of July for each of these three years.
2010 / 2011 / 2012How long does it take to issue a license, on average? / 30 days / 61 days / 30 days
Average applications received a month / 2313 / 2141 / 1886
Average email received a month / 2414 / 2238 / 1780
How many emails are waiting to be answered? / 518 / 839 / 2,046
How many emails are answered a day? / unknown / 124 / 116
How long does it take to enter incoming postal mail into system? / (1 day) / 7 days / 1 day
How many phone calls are answered in a day? / unknown / 135 / 25 (only for payment)
How many evaluators/pre-eval staff are there? / 4 / 5 / 4 (w/ 1 eval in Intake)
How many PSRs are there? / 5 / 4 (w/ former employee ½ time) / 3 (w/ former employee ½ time)
How many Intake staff are there? / 3 / 3 (w/ .5 FTE fr PP) / 3 (w/ 1 eval here) (1 temp)
Total FTE in Licensing and Intake / 12 / 12 / 10 (1 temp)
A. KEY ISSUES:
1. Technological constraints:
a. Our computer systems (specifically Data Entry and Track-It) aren’t working well or consistently. As time goes on, these systems are having an increasing number of problems. It appears that the Business Systems Director, who is no longer working at TSPC, spent a significant amount of time applying Band-Aids to the functionality of the system.
· The system requires significantly more time and effort than previously to enter data.
· Our system generates the daily “Evaluator Worksheets” in Track-It. This list is supposed to contain all of the files that are ready for action by the evaluators. However, the system continues to make mistakes that slow down the evaluators. For example:
o Once an evaluator issues a license and closes an electronic file, many of these files don’t stay closed. Instead, they open up again and then reappear on the evaluator sheets the following day, requiring evaluators to review them all over again.
o Some of the documents are being mislabeled by the system. For example, recently a number of “Tests” have been mislabeled by the system as “HQ evaluation.”
b. The new “SharePoint” web production system is experiencing several problems. The web site, which has only been activated a month, has already been fully down a few days. If the web is down, so is all ability to send out email and for licensees to access the web. Note: These shut downs have affected all state agencies using this web software.
· This is a communication problem for all Oregon agencies and their customers, given that more and more agency business is completed online. Understandably, this has resulted in a lot of educator frustration and stress. (This stress was compounded by TSPC’s decision to eliminate answering phones as a means to increase the speed of issuing licenses and answering email.)
· Also, the site that we access to load information onto the web is down even more frequently than the public site itself. During the past three weeks, the “authoring” web site has been down at least part of every single day.
c. We recently experienced a serious email problem. Last month, the Department of Administrative Services upgraded our email system. Unfortunately, they forgot to fully connect our customer response email system when they completed the work, and it took nearly four weeks for us to learn about this problem. TSPC staff had several hundred email “stuck” in the system for these four weeks. Combined with the lack of phone access, TSPC customers understandably were getting upset about not being able to get help from “anyone” in the office during the month of June.
· The good news: this was just a one-time human error, rather than a true technological problem. Once discovered, Matt Garret released all the “stuck” email in one afternoon/evening.
· The bad news: this issue has generated some very poor PR for the agency, and has resulted in a lot more email being sent into the office over the past several weeks. Additionally, it resulted in a few calls from Legislators, the Oregon Department of Education and email sent to available email addresses through the Outlook system (which is not used for customer responses to email.)
2. Staffing constraints:
a. Intake staff:
· Our original goal was to stay caught up with these tasks with only two people. For the following reasons, we are not able to maintain this goal right now:
o The Data Entry and Track It systems require too many steps to enter and scan information. These systems are very “sensitive” and if each step is not completed in a precise manner, it backs up the system and requires information be reentered before it can be accessed by the evaluators.
o Given the complexity and age of these systems, they simply don’t work well enough anymore. Each day, there are a number of malfunctions that need to then be addressed by Intake staff or Matt Garrett.
o The new electronic application form that can be submitted by email is slowing down the process of entering data. (Please see below for further information on this issue, as well as a recommendation.)
o Last summer, we had staffing assistance from the Professional Practices staff. (Each day, one of the staff would provide half-time help to Intake.) Given the increased discipline workload, Mel’s staff doesn’t have the time to assist Intake right now. This is a decrease of .5 FTE of productivity.
b. Public Service Representatives (PSRs):
· Current email goal for team: 350 emails a week
· Right now, we have 2.5 paid staff (but one has been transitioning back into full-time work due to serious health issues), with a former employee volunteering half-time, as compared to 4 PSRs last summer.
o With one PSR moving to Professional Practices, we have a vacant PSR position.
o Another PSR has also been out for most of the past few months, due to back surgery. She is now back half-time, and hopefully will be released by her doctor for full-time work later this month.
· It has definitely helped the PSR email workload not to take general licensee phone calls for the past several weeks. With that being said, the current customer service lack of access issue necessitates that we once again take phone calls.
o Right now, I have been assigning PSRs as follows on a daily basis:
§ One PSR responds to emails full-time.
§ One PSR handles the payment phone calls and walk-in customers, conducts scanned document and application review, and associates incoming email into each licensee’s electronic file.
§ The half-time PSR position floats – she responds to emails as first priority, but then fills in on other tasks, as needed.
§ The retiree/volunteer handles walk-ins, phone calls and responds to emails.
c. Evaluators:
· Current license-issuance goal for team: 600 licenses a week.
· Right now, we have four staff working as evaluators, not five. This is because I have assigned one evaluator to assist with Intake to stay caught up with deposits and mail scanning.
· The goal of 600 licenses a week is based on:
o 30 licenses a day, on average, is reasonable for the evaluators to complete. Given the high number of incomplete notices they are writing daily, HQ evaluations, and daily computer problems, consistently issuing a higher number of licenses is not possible without an updated computer system.
B. ACTIONS WE ARE TAKING:
1. We will be requiring all applicants to submit applications by postal mail until we have a new system that can automatically move the applications submitted online to the applicant’s file. We will ask that applications be submitted as completely as possible.
a. Three months ago, we moved to an Adobe application form that applicants can download themselves from our website and then directly submit via email.
· Advantage:
o This completely eliminated our need for sending out paper renewal packets, thereby saving us monthly printing and mailing costs.
· Disadvantages:
o We now receive applications in a much more “piecemeal” fashion, requiring extra time for both data entry (Intake) and license issuance (evaluators) to review each individual piece.
o A number of applications come into our system as “blank,” requiring time to contact applicants and ask them to resubmit by snail mail.
o ALL applications still need to be entered into our system by hand, whether applicants submit them by email or paper mail. This means that even though the email submittal is more efficient for most applicants, it is NOT more efficient for staff time.
o The old paper renewal packets that we used to mail out included a bar code on each packet, allowing the applicant’s name and contact information to be automatically entered when the packet was mailed back to the agency. Without paper forms, we no longer have the barcodes, so applicant information must be reentered by hand when we receive it. (However, given the amount of inaccurate information on the bar-coded renewal packets and the amount of staff time it took to organize and send the packets to each district, we do not want to return to paper packets that we mail out.)
· Requiring applicants to download and print the forms and instructions from our website and then mail the application and other materials to us in paper format is the best option at this time. Although we have then passed the mailing costs to the educators, this is the best solution given current reduced staffing and the current backlog of applications and communications needing response.
2. We will finish putting ALL application instructions on the web.
· Although all updated renewal instructions are now on the web, the instructions for first time applicants are still not completed.
· As the sole person now working on updating the web, this is simply a matter of the Licensure Director’s time. This is a top web priority right now.
3. We will return to answering licensing questions by phone (as well as email).
· Trying the “experiment” of not answering phone calls during peak summer months, helped to understand the true effect this workload had on production.
· However, even though staff are more efficient at answering questions by email, as opposed to answering phones, and it reduces the opportunities for educators to misunderstand the information they are receiving, we understand that the PR backlash doesn’t make the more efficient use of staff time a good trade-off.
· DAS estimates that they can get our phone lines open by Thursday, July 26th.
July 18, 2012/Data Classification: Level 1 - Published 5 4.6