I am curious to know if everyone has the same issues or if they are different.

We have “small agency” problems (18 total sworn).

Namely - at the end of a cycle year, ESPECIALLY the 3rd year, we are waiting for stuff that hasn’t occurred yet. I.E., didn’t do a juvenile Miranda yet. So we keep it open. It could literally happen the night before a mock assessment, or the night before our onsite. And god forbid they do it (the only one) wrong. 

Larger agencies are able to “close out” their assessments in time for their mocks, so they can just focus on the suggested changes/corrections. Ours are open until the last minute, and basically on day one of the next cycle year we go through our (prepared) list of stuff that never occurred - do AM notes.

There’s really no way around this for us. Near the end of a cycle we just go through and make sure our outstanding stuff is in a nice list where we can easily find it and/or close it out with a note. 

Ahhh I hear you, what do you think about marking those ones with a task to remind you to double check they have or have not occurred? 

Yes, we have not really embraced “tasks,” and although I am not our accreditation manager, I am her assistant. She just uses compliance tallies, and marks those that we are still waiting for as “pending.” It’s hard to pick a time to say “Yep, in compliance with a simple note, unless we get one of these occurrences before you arrive then we will add the proof.”  If an event does occur after that time, she has to open back up the assessment and update it (and explain the differences to the assessors upon their arrival). We meet once a week for accreditation, so we communicate quite a bit, and because we are so small we have a good handle on what has or hasn’t occurred.

Venting a little here, but I am envious of our Tow’s finance department, who is allowed to cut off all non-emergency spending for the fiscal year by August 16th(!). We can only do “emergency” spending between then and Sept. 30th, even though we prepared (and got approved) our budgets through Sept. 30th. This is so they can “close the books” and prepare their final reports. Kind of what we do, except our only “cut off” is on the day of the assessor’s arrival.

Communication is key when you have a team working environment. So that is great to hear you all are doing that!!! 

If you and the AM would be interested in checking out how tasks can work for you here is a great link or I would be happy to chat off line with you both or just you about how I used them when it was just me, it is even more important when there are more than one of you working in the files as you know. :) Have a great weekend. 

Task Management and Delegation