CAF in Innsbruck

CAF Best Practice

Date of publication: 2024, August

Organisation of judicial authorities has a fundamental effect on how state authorities function as well as the citizens’ trust in them. Public prosecution offices have also the role of evaluating and improving the citizens’ orientations and how they deal with justice-seeking citizens. As a part of judicial governance, extensive improvement initiatives based on principles of leadership quality and continuous improvement should be carried out.

The CAF self-assessment highlights the connection between organisational behaviour and its effects, important requirement for an effectively operating public prosecution office. It means, for example, optimizing processes and staff placement. Therefore, an innovation program was introduced for the first time from September to November 2012 at the Public Prosecution Office Innsbruck (Austria) and repeated then in February 2014 and November 2016.

The objectives of the Quality Assessment of the Public Prosecution Office Innsbruck were:
– the improvement of its services by means of an assessment based on sectorial criteria and international experiences
– the application of improvement measures where the need for action is a priority
– the integration of different quality improvement initiatives into the organization’s core business
– the facilitation of international benchmarking or benchlearning and exchange of experience between organisations within that sector

The process of preparing and applying the self-assessment involved the public prosecutors, the distinct prosecutors and the clerical staff using different methods and instruments.
The first step consisted in the presentation of the project to the participants together with an understanding of the CAF philosophy.

The next step was to adapt the methodology to the Public Prosecution Office and to define the approaches to assessing and choosing the enabler criteria. A participative approach was used so that all groups of employees could be included in the process, using different methods and instruments. Enablers were described from self-descriptions in workshops with public prosecutors, management, clerical staff and district prosecutors, with the results being defined by the management of the authority and jointly evaluated at the end. As for the CAF results, criteria and their measurements were jointly discussed. Subjective and objective result indicators were defined by the leadership to conduct an extensive quality assessment of the public prosecution office’s performance.

For the creation of the common definition of measures of quality improvement, the Public Office Innsbruck was compared to the Public Prosecution Office Bozen/Bolzano. The Office initiated the pilot project in 2004 with the aim of improving the organisation, the quality of the services, establishing a culture of information, communication, dialogue and assessing the quality in a target group-oriented manner from the citizens’ and other public administrations’ perspectives. This innovative approach allowed for benchlearning, namely the process of learning from each other.

Based on the results of the CAF self-assessment, public prosecutors, district prosecutors and office clerks jointly defined at the end of 2012 several improvement actions in a “innovation program”. Innovations projects, continuously updated and checked periodically in quarterly project meetings were the following:

Inclusive employee anonymous quantitative survey on job satisfaction, motivation, management behavior, organization of work and collaboration, followed by an evaluation and analysis of the results
Survey of the public through a feedback form
Revision of the guidelines for district prosecutors with practical examples
Development of guidelines for law office employees
Improvement of public relations and media presence through press conferences and optimization of the website
Organisation chart with focus on the team principle
Improvement of the mission/vision statement
Process description and innovation concept
Knowledge management
Opinion box

To finalise and to evaluate the overall CAF projects, all employees of the Public Prosecution Office Innsbruck were administered a survey on the “Quality improvement after the Common Assessment Framework (CAF)”.
Overall, public prosecutors and district prosecutors stated that they had been adequately informed about the CAF project and that the work stages were transparent.

The CAF project’s overall evaluation can be described as good and for many public prosecutors as being very good. The public prosecutors’ assessment of the external experts’ work was defined very good whereas almost the majority of the participants described it as good. Furthermore, the workload in the CAF project was assessed as “appropriate”.

Lessons learned for the organisation (and potentially for other CAF-users):

Finding a common language is required and takes time. Within the context of public prosecution offices, it was collectively emphasized that the terms “partners”, “clients”, and “citizens” are difficult to classify and thus people interacting institutionally with the office were jointly denoted as “parties”;
The support from the top management is essential throughout the whole CAF-journey;
Responsibilities for innovation projects should be clearly defined;
Periodical progress monitoring is necessary.