Question:   How Can Post Occupancy Evaluation help you or DGS do a better job?

A Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is valuable to a wide variety of General Service's functions by providing feedback and a mechanism for improving "Institutional Memory" or knowledge transfer.

The necessity of feedback to improve is obvious, if not somewhat painful, in the event of justifiable and accurate criticism. However, the greatest benefits can be attained from trying to minimize the actions that annoy our customers, and maximize those actions that generate positive feedback. To the extent management is able to use the POE adjust the functional operations of the organization to produce the desired results, so much the better.

Any office in General Services could provide examples of how improving knowledge transfer improves the service reputation of DGS. DGS projects often are assigned to staff on the basis of staff time availability, rather on location or knowledge of a situation, facility, or area. As a result, several different staff members can be working on different projects covering the same situation, facility, or area. With the turnover of personnel at some of the client agencies, the "Institutional Memory" is often not available to DGS staff. Knowledge acquired painfully from previous experiences may be lost as a result, and DGS may repeat the same mistakes because of turnover at the clients' end. Obviously, turnover in DGS has the same effect.

The POE should provide the transfer mechanism to help both the client and DGS learn from previous experiences. To the extent the POE results can be searched by subject in a database, knowledge gathering could be fine-tuned to minimize the amount of time expended trying to learn from previous errors. Data collection is expensive and only really cost effective to the extent that results can be searched to avoid having different staff repeating the same mistakes. We all suffer when that happens.

Nick Cimino, Winning Entry
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