Business Enterprise Mapping has been implementing Law Enforcement process improvement for over 10 years. BEM’s Perigon Playbook provides a far more efficient, effective, and robust method for documenting and improving agency performance. Law enforcement agencies of all types and sizes provide safety and security services within diverse communities. These agencies are tasked with similar missions, including, but not limited to:
- Suppressing crime.
- Collaborating with the community to establish service expectations.
- Building effective relationships with labor organizations.
- Building effective relationships with community groups.
- Working closely with local, county, state, and federal governments.
- Aligning limited law enforcement resources to meet safety and security expectations.
- Delivering services with fiscally responsible budgets.
- Responding to calls for law enforcement reform.
- Managing through economic downturns that have negatively impacted staffing.
- Utilizing technology, including social media, to support the law enforcement mission.
If we remove references to crime and law enforcement, most of these elements are relevant to effectively managing organizations of any type. Therefore, in addition to expansive law enforcement knowledge, the successful law enforcement agency should possess, and effectively utilize, solid organizational performance management practices that are aligned with current best practice management methods.
The Law Enforcement Process Improvement Challenge
Summarized below are the most common Law Enforcement management challenges that we see.
Reactive agency management practices
- The absence of a uniform agency management approach.
- Lack of unity in agency’s managerial purpose.
- Employment of reactive management versus proactive management.
- Emphasis on reactive reform versus proactive transformation
- Commitment to “the way we’ve always done it”.
- Stressful transfer transitions
Inconsistent performance management
- Budgets continue to fund ineffectiveness and inefficiency.
- Lack of performance knowledge and accountability throughout the organization.
- Lack of employee engagement.
- A haphazard approach to improvement.
- Repeatedly solving the same problems.
Broken, ineffective, or obsolete core processes
- Ineffective, obsolete, and nonexistent standard operational procedures.
- Significant use of single subject matter experts whose knowledge is lost when absent or when they leave their current position.
- A conflict between compliance and performance.
- Disconnected relationships with external customers and community groups.
Consistent performance shortfalls
- Property & Evidence storage (organization, access, inventory, audits, property destruction, prosecutor authorization).
- Field Training is reliant upon individual trainers versus a consistent agency-wide training approach.
- Incident reports are not timely, complete, or accurate, delaying the availability of critical information for decision-making and reporting purposes.
The Perigon Method for Law Enforcement Process Improvement
Business Enterprise Mapping utilizes our proprietary Perigon Method for Law Enforcement, a powerful and proven Law Enforcement performance improvement methodology that builds business maps that deliver the following management tools.
Perigon transforms how Law Enforcement Agencies meet the stakeholder requirements,
The Perigon Method delivers increased law enforcement credibility; enriched relationships with the community served, improved stakeholder satisfaction, and reduced organizational risk. Shown below are a few reasons why.
Perigon attacks silos.
Working with agency personnel, Perigon documents agency workflow, from business systems to business processes to tasks. Perigon defines how work gets done and provides insights into what can be done to improve it. This construction is foundational for every department, essential to gaining control of work, and the necessary first step towards defining, measuring, improving, and aligning work to drive sustainable performance improvement for all law enforcement agencies.
Perigon engages staff to find a better way.
Defining workflow structure is best achieved by involving those who do the work to define and improve their work. In BEM’s Perigon Method, our experienced Program Directors build organization system and process maps real time while facilitating employee workshops to create specific deliverables. Perigon is an excellent tool to capture the tremendous value of staff engagement by:
- Building a worthwhile purpose
- Encouraging story sharing
- Facilitating teamwork
- Developing skills
- Breaking down barriers
Perigon finds and eliminates problems
Law enforcement process improvement opportunities can be found in many areas within departments. Perigon surfaces these opportunities, which we call RED CLOUDS, as we engage teams to map the core processes of the law enforcement organization. We see many common improvement opportunities, which are briefly summarized:
- Undefined work.
- Unknown customer specifications and customer expectations
- Disconnected workflows
- Excessive chain-of-command reviews that may not be necessary or missing required approvals.
- Unclear decision-making.
- Different employees doing the same things differently.
- No relevant measurement, analysis, and improvement of law enforcement system and process effectiveness.
Perigon for Law Enforcement Process improvement
Perigon creates a valuable organizational asset by documenting how work gets done to improve consistency, capability, and credibility to meet community requirements. Perigon,
- Untangles confusion.
- Connects the organization with the community it serves
- Breaks down silos.
- Captures the purpose of all work.
- Creates strategic and tactical alignment.
- Distributes authority and accountability.
- Clarifies decision-making.
- Measures the right performance.
- Defines organization deliverables.
- Documents an agency’s knowledge.
- Uncovers hundreds (or even thousands) of Red Clouds.