Prince William County 311

Show Notes

County Executive Chris Shorter sits down with Chief Information Officer and Director of Information Technology, Rob Mancini, to talk about the launch of PWC 311, a new service platform that makes it easier than ever for residents to request services, report issues and get information. Watch how 311 is transforming how government works.

What is Shorter Topics?

Hosted by Prince William County Executive Chris Shorter, The Shorter Topics vodcast is designed to provide quick yet insightful discussions on initiatives that directly impact the community. Each episode will feature in-depth conversations with content experts, county leaders and program managers who are revolutionizing the way services are delivered. With its tagline—Shorter Topics, Bigger Impacts—the vodcast aims to inform and engage residents by showcasing the incredible projects and people driving change in Prince William County Government.

Chris Shorter: 00:27

Welcome to Shorter Topics. I am Chris Shorter, your county executive, and here with me today, a very special episode. I have here Rob Mancini. He's the director of our Department of Information Technology. Rob, welcome to Shorter Topics.

Rob Mancini: 00:45

Thank you very much, Chris.

Rob Mancini: 00:46

It's great to be here.

Chris Shorter: 00:47

We're gonna be talking about a very exciting topic today, something that recently launched here in Prince William County, Three-one-one. Rob, before we get into that though, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, and maybe even how you got into public service?

Rob Mancini: 01:07

Okay, great. Well, thank you. Thanks for having

Chris Shorter: 01:09

me, Chris. Absolutely.

Rob Mancini: 01:11

My role here is as the director of the Department of Information Technology is to try to deliver positive transformative solutions to the workforce and the community. And three eleven is a good example of that. My journey and how I got here, I started out as one of the founding members of a company called America Online in its early days. I believe I was employee number 34, and it was those years that really cinched IT as a career for me, taught me a lot about how to get IT right, and I carry those lessons with me to this day. And from there, I went to a telecom company, software development, multinational corporation, and then into the finance arena as an IT executive.

Rob Mancini: 01:54

And then I got invited by Mayor Gray to come to DC. And that's where I was the CTO of the city, a very similar role to what I have here. And that's where public service really hooked me. Well, I think once you get a taste of public service, and if you've got a service in your blood, you really can't let go of that. And so I left the DC and went to a pharmaceutical company as a CIO and was itching to get back into public service.

Rob Mancini: 02:21

And here was Prince William County, the previous CIO, asked me to apply for this role. So here I am back in public service. I think it's where I belong. I love delivering solutions that matter, tying work to a community, no better feeling than we're in service to others. That's what hooks

Chris Shorter: 02:39

me about police. I so appreciate you putting it that way. Oftentimes, especially with departments and agencies that serve inside the government, primarily government agencies, you don't get a chance to spotlight. I don't get a chance to spotlight you in HR and some of the other agencies that are really internal. So appreciate that you really think of it the same way anyone else would.

Chris Shorter: 03:08

You are of service and providing support to not just our government, but to our community. So appreciate that you see it that way as well.

Rob Mancini: 03:15

Thank you. That's the mindset I try to impart in my staff, because we are very much a behind the scenes type of an organization, but we can easily tie the impact we have to the community by the people that we support and the organizations we enable in this government. And that helps motivate the team. We have another reason for coming to work and getting excited about what they do.

Chris Shorter: 03:36

Okay. So, now the special topic today, three eleven. Now many communities, obviously have, created a three eleven service request system. Obviously we believe ours is special, and you're gonna talk a bit about why today. But just to start out, could

Rob Mancini: 03:57

you help us understand what is three eleven? Well, know, I have some really good colleagues in the office of communications who who actually put together a video, and I think they really did capture the essence of what we were trying to accomplish here.

Video VO: 04:10

Welcome to PwC 3 1 1, Prince William County's 1 stop shop for service requests. Whether you're reporting an issue, requesting a service, or looking for more information, PwC three eleven is here to help. Chat, tap, click, or call to connect. Chat with Ask Will, our 20 fourseven virtual

Video VO: 04:46

be

Video VO: 04:39

to

Video VO: 04:43

you explore helpful county resources. Call 311 to speak directly with a customer service representative. PwC three eleven One Platform Four Simple Ways to Connect. Tap, click or call to connect.

Chris Shorter: 05:01

Tell us a bit about the video.

Rob Mancini: 05:03

Well, the video was put together by our office of communications. They do such a great job with these videos.

Chris Shorter: 05:08

Yeah, very informative. Obviously, when I saw it, I was like, this is perfect for residents who may not be familiar with three eleven at all as a platform.

Rob Mancini: 05:19

Well, you, Chris. Three eleven is really a system for a resident to make a request for information or service to their government in a way that's convenient for them. This is really aimed at the constituents of this county, the resident, the business owner, the visitor of the county. And I think this is a really good example of a government making a commitment to service excellence. If you have an issue or a question, would like some service, come to three eleven, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for you to get what you need from your government.

Rob Mancini: 05:51

And that's the government I wanna work for. That's a government you're probably very proud to lead. We're doing all we can to make it easy for a constituent to get what they need from this government on their terms, on the platform of their choice, on the time of day that they want, without having to know what department does what. Just go to three eleven.

Chris Shorter: 06:10

Very good and inspiring. The way you've put it, the way you think about it, the way your team has now sort of implemented. So one single platform, but different ways in which residents and even our own employees can engage us to get information, to make requests, and then to see those requests work their way through the system. I guess, can you talk a bit about the various ways that, someone would engage us through 311? We call them channels, Chris.

Chris Shorter: 06:42

All right.

Rob Mancini: 06:42

We have primarily four channels. If you wanna reach us on the phone, dial 311 anywhere from within the county and we'll answer your call. If you'd rather do it on your mobile phone, download the Prince William three eleven app and use it that way. Or if you'd rather go on the website and do a service request and find the service portal, find the request that applies to you and go through that process, you can do that too. Or you can chat with a chat bot called Will on the county website and ask for service.

Chris Shorter: 07:12

Okay. And for those who are watching the podcast or listening in, you go to our website today, you're gonna see Will on the lower right hand.

Rob Mancini: 07:22

Lower right hand corner. Yes, sir. And Will is fully multilingual, probably 70 to 80 languages. Yes.

Chris Shorter: 07:28

Now we happen to be the most diverse County in Virginia. So our residents come from many parts of the globe and many languages spoken for us to have a chat bot, a chat feature that now is responsive to the great need for us to be diverse in a number of languages that we support is pretty exciting. I'm glad you mentioned

Rob Mancini: 07:55

that because it reminds me to thank Director Burgos in the Equity Inclusion Department for helping us identify the most frequent languages, most commonly spoken foreign languages in this County so that we could make sure that it worked well with our chatbot. So thank you to Maria and thanks to

Chris Shorter: 08:13

The whole team, yeah,

Rob Mancini: 08:14

for sure.

Chris Shorter: 08:14

Fantastic, okay. Important to note that you can still call us and talk to a live person. So don't wanna, for those in the county who might be experiencing this system for the first time, 311, making service requests to the county, to think that the only option is for you to download the app or to use our website. For those who don't wanna do that, but instead wanna call and speak to a live person, you have that option.

Rob Mancini: 08:45

Yes, and this was an opportunity. We gave a lot of thought to that, Chris. What does the constituent need? When do they need us? How might they need us?

Chris Shorter: 08:53

Now, are many government agencies that do a lot for our county. We are a full service government. All agencies have not yet signed up to participate in the service request system. So I wonder if you could talk about just by way of example, some of the types of service requests that might come in and may be available and even where folks could find out which type of request they could make.

Rob Mancini: 09:24

We started in those areas that most residents would recognize. If you wanna report graffiti or a traffic light that's out or a street sign, or a downed tree or tall grass, Those are the types of things that's bread and butter for our county. We deliver those services every day. And so we started there because we knew we were rolling out a complex platform that would take folks a good bit of time to get used to. So the folks who were used to delivering every day are out there in the community.

Rob Mancini: 09:51

We felt like we could help them to give them some tools, to help them get even better at their job, or to find out how many needs there really were in the county. And this system actually does that. They're gonna collect a lot of data and find out what the real demand is for a graffiti or a tall grass or a downed tree or a street light. And behind that are some outstanding departments in this county who do such great work. It's so nice to be able to feature that on a system like this, because it elevates the work that they do.

Rob Mancini: 10:21

It helps us understand what the demand is. As a county, we can resource it. And we talk a lot about data driven decisions where we're collecting really good data and we're gonna make better decisions with it.

Chris Shorter: 10:31

Yeah, I am happy you went there. So behind the scenes, and this is certainly how I think about it, sort of macro, what will this give us the ability to do as a county once this truly gets going and we see the numbers of participating residents making service requests?

Rob Mancini: 10:56

There are a variety of things. One of them, I think the first thing most residents or constituents would think of is efficiency. How many times are we answering the same question today without it being the same person or maybe not answering it the same way, right? We're capturing that sort of data in this process, in this project, so we can get the same answer to the same question, answered the same way every time, and we never miss an opportunity to get the communication sent back in a timely way to the constituent who requested it. And when you do that, your staff can focus on finding more and more areas where there are questions we need to answer.

Rob Mancini: 11:32

And we over time collect a very powerful knowledge base of the types of questions that our constituents ask us on a regular basis, which also indicates areas of need. We're learning from those things when we cross reference those things.

Chris Shorter: 11:46

Absolutely. And then,

Rob Mancini: 11:48

so that's a big piece of what we're doing here, I think. And I think the departments, I can't thank them enough for the There were 11 different departments on this first rollout and they've all leaned into their process of here's what we do, and how can we do it better with three eleven? And for the first time, the county's unifying that process across all of its departments who are participating, and maybe in the future we'll add more if there's sufficient demand.

Chris Shorter: 12:11

Yeah, and so as you talk about sort of managing by the numbers, using data to make better decisions, certainly on a sort of micro scale, we are intending to help our residents, help our employees, help visitors get better service faster. But we are also going to be looking at that information to say, what are the trends? What are we hearing, seeing in terms of the types of questions asked? Because that might go into the need to invest more into a certain area, increase capacity in a certain area of our government. So much more to come that we are now empowered to sort of do with information.

Chris Shorter: 12:56

And I tell you for a county, that's almost 500,000 in terms of population. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, full service government, we are excited to get this going and to get this started. It'll be a real opportunity for us to serve our community better, as you stated, and we hope folks take advantage. We're really excited to see what the numbers tell us. I'll you one thing I'm excited

Rob Mancini: 13:25

about, Chris. I'm excited to see this government really lean into a commitment to continuous improvement, because that's really what's going on here. Everybody's going to see how well we handle those service requests. The board of County Supervisors are going to see how well we're performing. There's some accountability and transparency here that really makes us all deliver our best.

Rob Mancini: 13:49

And in an era where people may be a little bit jaded about government, we're not afraid of that. And I think everybody in this County should take pride in the fact that we're gonna stand there and show everybody how well we can perform, and we're not afraid of that. And we're committing to do it.

Chris Shorter: 14:02

I really appreciate that. And you're right, trusting government. You think of this as a technology tool only, and you miss the bigger picture that this really helps put in a very plain way what our government is doing. That sort of Prince William County is working on behalf of our residents, for our residents. And this system allows for us to document it, essentially.

Chris Shorter: 14:30

This is how many folks called in, this is what they called in for, this is how quickly we responded to those calls, text messages, app requests, website requests. Thank you and your entire team for pushing in this way. I also wanna just acknowledge our board for the investment. This would not be possible without us making the leap forward in terms of investing in this kind of system and this program. And like you said, this is us as a government sort of stepping up to where our community needs us.

Chris Shorter: 15:08

I wanna also acknowledge just the agencies, you said it, the 11 agencies that have signed up first to participate. They are well, first up, and we're gonna sort of, and I will say they will be the first to benefit. In all cases, I think all 11 agencies get the most feedback from our residents and the most requests. So this is gonna be hopefully a benefit to them as well.

Rob Mancini: 15:40

I would like to thank my DUET engineering team. The entire department really had to come together to help get this done. And like I said before, we don't do any of this ourselves. We had 11 agency partners, a whole board of county supervisors and executive leadership team, all of whom were supporting this work. But the nitty gritty, the hard stuff the IT team had to do, I'm so proud of the work that they did here and how they pushed vendors and really wanted to give the County a win because it was very much an opportunity for DO IT to show that we could lead an enterprise project that had some serious benefit to the county.

Rob Mancini: 16:18

And we had to work really well with all departments.

Chris Shorter: 16:20

So we have focused so much on customer experience. I mean, we've been talking about this for the last two years, two and a half years, really the focus on making sure that the customer, no matter how you define customer, that their engagement with our government, that their engagement with our organization is a positive one and getting better over time. This is just another sort of, if you will, opportunity to do that. So three eleven automated, multiple ways that you can engage us. This is very good for our government and for our county.

Rob Mancini: 17:00

I agree. Anytime governments are are engineering better experiences, the constituent wins.

Chris Shorter: 17:05

Thank you all so much for joining us. This was a very exciting conversation, a very special topic. And, Rob, thank you again for being here. And please join us next time for Shorter Topics, Bigger Impacts.