Saving San Francisco's small businesses
ROLE
Project Lead
Problem
Would-be small business owners in San Francisco were struggling to navigate the city’s rules and regulations. The time and costs required were keeping many from achieving their dream of opening a small business.
In November of 2020, San Francisco voted to pass legislation that requires the City to issue small business permits within 30 days.
The legislation mandated that the program be publicly available just two months later, in January of 2021.
Goal
I was tasked with leading a cross-departmental group to determine how we could reduce permitting timelines from months to days. This required answering three main questions:
What are the challenges small businesses face that lead to long timelines?
What are the process, policy, organizational, and technological challenges that lead to long timelines?
What changes can we make in six weeks that will have the biggest impact on reducing permitting timelines?
Discovery Process
Given the short project timeline, I needed to take advantage of past work to focus my discovery efforts on areas of greater uncertainty.
This meant relying on my previous research with permitting applicants as a starting point for understanding their needs, and leveraging existing experience principles that should guide how to meet those needs.
I started with interviews of City staff to better understand their processes and how they work together (or don’t).
I did 2 rounds of interviews with each of the permitting departments while creating, updating, and socializing service blueprints.
Findings
The research revealed two major findings that would frame our approach.
Cycle of Resubmissions
First, the permitting ecosystem is complex and disconnected, and there’s a reliance on the applicant to interact with each department independently to figure out the requirements applicable to their project.
The absence of cohesive guidance leads to applications that are inaccurate, miss information, and lack the required documents and forms.
Correcting each of these issues takes time and costs the applicant money as the applicants resubmit and staff re-review.
Department Backlogs
The second major finding came from a quantitative review of department data which revealed that the bulk of review time comes from applications sitting in a backlog, waiting for staff to review.
How Might We…
Based on these findings, I created two guiding problem statements that the cross-departmental team would need to address:
How might we improve the quality of initial submissions to reduce the number of resubmissions required?
How might we address the backlogs to reduce the length of time to review?
Workshop
To answer these questions I created and facilitated a workshop bringing together staff from all of the permitting departments.
Solutions
Through the workshop we identified process, policy, organization, and technology changes we could make to address the main challenges. There are 4 main parts of the solution that work together::
The creation of a ‘check what you need’ form
White glove service
The introduction of a ‘complete & accurate’ check
Review fastlanes
‘Check what you need’ form
Instead of relying on applicants to figure out for themselves what forms and permits are required for their process, we created a pre-application form to provide personalized recommendations.
The form asks simple, layperson questions to understand what the applicant is trying to do.
The system determines what forms and permits the applicant needs to submit for their project and sends those recommendations in an email, along with a unique ‘submission’ form link.
That unique ‘submission’ form serves as a single place to submit all of their forms, only asking for the things needed for their project.
White glove service
Rather than having the applicant work with Departments individually and directly, we introduced the Office of Small Business into the administration of the program.
They serve as a single point of contact for the applicant, and advocate on their behalf internally, proactively ensuring projects keep moving.
‘Complete and accurate’ check
We introduced a 48 hour period where all the reviewing Departments will do a quick check that all the documents and information they need for their review have been submitted.
This ensures that the application is starting from a better place once the 30 day review begins.
Review fastlanes
We created separate queues in each Department’s review process for Prop H projects. These have dedicated staff members that will pause other work to address Prop H applications as they come in.
Impact
With these solutions in place, almost 70% of small business permits that previously took months are now issued in under 30 days. Even when it takes longer, applicants report a positive experience due to the transparency throughout the process and the proactivity of the Office of Small Business staff working on their behalf.
Due to its success, elements of this process like the ‘check what you need’ form and ‘complete & accurate’ check are being implemented in other permitting processes within the city.
This experience has been absolutely amazing. And surprising, you know, when you're thinking "this could take me eight months to get my permit approved" and you get it done in basically one month.
I wish I had more negatives to say about the process, but it's really hard to find negatives when you get through it in 28 business days.
