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How do you divide up your administrative cases?

How do you divide up your day-to-day cases?

  • Each different cases are associated with individual job/position.

    Votes: 1 14.3%

  • Employees just work it out between themselves.

    Votes: 2 28.6%

  • Office admin/secretary assigns them as they come in

    Votes: 1 14.3%

  • Supervisor/Director assigns them as they come in

    Votes: 2 28.6%

  • Software randomly assigns them as they are submitted

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Other

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 1 person shop/I do it all

    Votes: 1 14.3%
  • Total voters
    7
  • Poll closed .
B

bureaucrat#3

Member
Messages
1,639
Points
42
Trying to figure out a better way to divide non-meeting cases (ie administrative site plans, minor subdivisions, sign permits). How do you do it?
 
Two-person shop, myself as the Planner and my supervisor as Planning Manager. I handle cell tower colocations and smaller site reviews, my supervisor takes larger admin cases that require review closer to PC site plan review. I manage the ZBA and Historic District, so I get all of those cases for the most part, and since PC-required cases are sporadic and not high numbers compared to newer or booming communities, it makes sense he would handle the larger administrative review site plans as well. But we do not have a formal policy for this, it's just how it shook out once I came on board. My predecessor and supervisor may have had a different delineation of duties worked out between them.
 
I dole them out at our weekly meeting- if there's trouble with one we reconvene to work it out/decide what we need to ask for from the applicant.
 
The easiest cases go to our permit technician, and the most complex get assigned to me as the department head, and the two planners pick the rest based on their interest, workload, or past communications with the applicant. I will usually offer supporting roles to my planners for my individual projects so that they can also grow (and to help manage my time balance of adminstrative duties and being a working director).
 
Planning department of one, currently, so I do it all. Occasionally, I'll send a sign permit or two over to our GIS technician as she wants to get more involved in planning...although reviewing sign permits may be the easiest way to dissuade someone from going into city planning.

At a previous job, the assistant department head would randomly assign cases to the 3/4 staff planners via an excel spreadsheet, updated weekly; the more complex cases would go to the more senior staff.
 
Bumping this thread. We get roughly 30-40 administrative items (sign, house setbacks, business license approvals, minor subdivisions) that come in every week. The task should range between a 15 minute review to an hour or two max. These are divided primarily between two employees and I'll jump in when something comes up or we get behind.

dw914er said:
The easiest cases go to our permit technician, and the most complex get assigned to me as the department head, and the two planners pick the rest based on their interest, workload, or past communications with the applicant. I will usually offer supporting roles to my planners for my individual projects so that they can also grow (and to help manage my time balance of adminstrative duties and being a working director).
Click to expand...
This is generally how we have been working, but I don't know why we can't keep up with them or why the employees look to me to assign them basic tasks. It seems like they should be able to simply either do it or let the other person know I'll take these if you take these. It feels like we either make this too hard or things don't get done.
 
We have a work queue. Every day one of the planners is assigned to work on the queue. This works for larger departments, I don't know about smaller ones. We also have enough people to share the load, but we don't ever catch up on the reviews either. I think we are 4 days behind right now. That's pretty consistent for us.
 
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