Merit Systems Protection Boar
This website was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Web Managers Best Practice Awards. Members of the Web Managers Forum will vote for winners, to be announced at the Government Web Managers conference May 5, 2008, in Washington, DC.
Below is this finalist's nomination form, so Forum members can learn more about the website before they vote.
Describe the top customer task you're nominating:
Filing an appeal online
URL of the top customer task:
Describe how you identified your top customer task.The Merit Systems Protection Board's (MSPB) primary mission is to provide for independent adjudication of appeals of personnel actions for over 2 million federal employees. Many of the appeals filed with MSPB are from pro se appellants—employees representing themselves. Pro se appellants did not have as much of the legal and process knowledge involved in filing a case nor did they have as much access to the information available, especially if they were stationed overseas. Yet, they were expected to file an appeal and respond to orders in a timely manner or risk having their case dismissed for timeliness. Based on the feedback from appellants and federal agencies, and the advent of e–Government, we identified our top customer task as the ability to easily file an appeal online. We created e–Appeal (http://e–appeal.mspb.gov) to make it easier for our customers to do business with MSPB. Since e-Appeal was first introduced in fiscal year 2004, the percentage of initial appeals filed online has steadily increased to 29 percent in fiscal year 2007, accounting for 1,763 of the 5,991 initial appeals filed with the MSPB in that year.
Describe how you made this task easier to complete.
Previously, appellants had to find the paper appeal form and filing procedures. After figuring out the filing procedures, they assembled their appeal package and mailed it to MSPB. The cost and time involved in the paper filing process was even more burdensome for appellants stationed overseas. The first step we took to make the task of filing appeals easier was to create an website for online filing https://e–appeal.mspb.gov/, which is a direct link from the www.mspb.gov site. Because many of our pro se appellants do not have the technology and resources of a law firm, we designed e–Appeal to be like TurboTax, with an easy step–by–step interview to take the appellant through the filing process. Online help is available as they go through the interview. Through continued enhancements, e–Appeal is now a valuable tool for pro se appellants, appellants with representation, and agency representatives. There are five major functions on e-Appeal—filing a new appeal, filing a pleading, filing an addendum, changing your e–filing status, and accessing the case documents. To account for the various equipment and software used by appellants and agencies, e–Appeal accepts files in almost any format and allows appellants to directly describe their case online.
How do you routinely monitor the success of this task?
MSPB's e–Appeal website directly supports the agency's strategic goals of issuing timely decisions and processing cases more efficiently. In fact, one of our annual performance measures is the percentage of initial appeals filed through e–Appeal. Parties who file electronically can receive acknowledgement orders from MSPB instantaneous by email, instead of through regular mail. Regular mail can take as much as 15 days to reach agencies given the irradiation of mail. Parties to the case can access their online case file anytime, anywhere. Agency representatives can assign themselves to a case electronically instead of mailing in a designation form. Files from e–Appeal are converted to PDF format with OCR, bookmarks, and sequential page numbers to allow our Administrative Judges to easily navigate the oftentimes large case files, perform full–text searches, copy and paste relevant passages, and include electronic annotations. In fiscal year 2007, a total of 5,991 initial appeals were filed with the MSPB, and 1,763 of those, or 29 percent, were filed through e–Appeal. We also distributed 8,297 documents electronically and received 6,478 electronic pleadings in FY 2007. We continue to receive positive feedback about e–Appeal, and enhance it based on customer suggestions.
Extra Credit: Describe what you've done to improve other critical tasks and promote critical tasks within your agency.
We have worked directly with agencies to encourage the use of e–Appeal and to gather improvement suggestions. In addition to e–Appeal, we have redesigned our public website to make it easier for pro se appellants to research the procedures for filing an appeal, related federal regulations, and published Board decisions. We also have developed a Web application called "Quick Case" to enhance the daily productivity of our Administrative Judges (AJs). When AJs open Quick Case, they immediately see their assigned cases. They can sort them by various fields, such as docket number, case age, case status, appellant name, and agency name. They can easily see all the details associated with that case, including hearings and other case appointments, the parties' contact information, and all the documents associated with the case. If the document is electronic, the AJ can view that document instantaneously. In addition to their assigned cases, the AJ can perform legal research using Quick Case. The MSPB has made extensive efforts to consolidate all legal documents into one comprehensive MSPB knowledge repository. This repository becomes increasingly important as MSPB faces ongoing retirements of longtime staff. Quick Case is also available to staff who telework or are traveling.
