“Not only does it save time and money but also means we’re providing better services to the residents of the county as well,” said Anoka County Commissioner District 6 Rhonda Sivarajah.
One of the projects on display at the showcase this week was from Anoka County Elections.
“In 2016, we implemented a new program: online election judge training. Prior to 2016 we did in-person training with about 1,500 people every even election year for presidential state elections,” said Anoka County elections manager Cindy Reichert.
This year only one in-person training session was held, previously 34 sessions took place. Typically Reichert would spend the entire month of July out of the office, driving all over the county conducting trainings. Now she can work on other tasks while getting real time updates as judges complete their training.
“We created a program that we can give to most of our election judges that is a two hour electronically delivered series of videos. They can watch them at home. It requires them to take a quiz to make sure they’re understanding the information,” said Reichert.
This is the second year the county has held an event to showcase continuous improvement projects and they look forward to the work continuing for many years.
“This isn’t something that just happens overnight, this is a process that we have been working on and we want to continue to expand this around county government because in the end we want staff to be looking at how they can deliver these services in the most effectively efficient manner,” said Sivarajah.
The county employs 1,803 people full time and they will continue to put more of them through lean training in the future.
