Do you remember the scene in the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George’s Uncle Billy loses an $8,000 deposit and it nearly results in the ruin of the family’s business? Absentminded Uncle Billy had somehow lost or misplaced the money on his way to the bank. In today’s dollars, that deposit would be equivalent to about $96,000.
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It’s easy to assume larger local governments have no problems fully implementing best practices for segregation of duties. While segregating duties can be easier for larger governments with more employees, they can struggle with the process, too. The State Auditor’s Office has some suggestions for navigating challenges on your journey to segregating duties!
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Employees who have knowledge about a new process aren’t automatically proficient at achieving the desired results. Even with the best of intention and motivation, if I just depend on my individual knowledge and desire, I might never attain the needed ability level to make a new or changing process successful. So how do we incorporate a new skill into our ability?
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The monthly reconciliation is an essential control activity to government finance. Although we cannot prescribe a uniform way to perform your reconciliation, we have developed a list of best practices to consider and compare to your own government’s current processes.
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Change management starts with building awareness and desire because it recognizes that success requires each employee to choose to adopt and use the new process. Training for new knowledge will yield best results if the people involved have enough awareness and desire to embrace the change, and to seek knowledge and put it to use.
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How many of us have been shaped by a work culture that lives by an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule? But what does that really mean?
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In our Lesson 1 post, we introduced change management as a strategy to implement successful process improvement initiatives. In this installment, we will introduce the ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) change management model. This is a five-stage approach to help organizations manage the people side of change. Today, we will focus on Awareness.
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Government staff often ask where to start when they seek to improve a process like permits, asset management, approval queues and so on.
It’s hard to know what actions to take without looking at why you are where you are today, and the mindset of the people who will have to make the change happen.
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When was the last time you assessed risks related to your take-home vehicle program, or updated your policy? Are you certain the benefits outweigh the costs?
To help you navigate these waters, our Office’s Center for Government Innovation has developed a new resource to help you identify and implement best practices over take-home vehicles.
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BBB. Recently, the Performance Center provided several resources on accounting for capital assets to help local governments with financial reporting. Another group of assets, which fall below a government’s capitalization threshold, should also be considered when establishing and evaluating asset policies and other internal controls. In Washington, we frequently refer to these as “small and attractive assets,” but they these could be described using different terminology.
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