Areaka: Well, hey friends. Welcome back to another episode of Accreditation Made Easy, the podcast that takes the stress out of accreditation. I am your host, Areaka Jewell. Today we're talking about something that sounds pretty basic. Your accreditation cycle. It's one of those accreditation terms that we use all the time. We're in year two of our cycle. Our assessment is at the end of this cycle. We're starting a new cycle. But when does that cycle actually begin? And when does it end? Because I think there's a tendency to view the formal assessment maybe as the finish line. You've spent months, years getting ready for it. The assessors arrive, you go through the assessment, they leave, and finally you're done. Except you're not. From an accreditation standpoint, you're actually at the beginning again. And that's what I want to talk about today. First, let's cover the basics. If your agency is pursuing initial accreditation, your accrediting body typically gives you a certain amount of time to prepare for that first assessment. depending on the accrediting body, that might be somewhere around one or two years. But once you become initially accredited, you enter an accreditation cycle. And the cycle is essentially the period between your formal assessments. And again, depending on your accrediting body, that cycle is commonly three or four years, whether you're a state program or maybe you're CALEA Here's the part I think is important. Your cycle most likely doesn't start on January 1st. It doesn't necessarily start on the anniversary of when your agency received its accreditation award either. And it certainly Doesn't start whenever you decide that you're ready to begin working again after recovering from your assessment. Your new cycle begins the day after your formal assessment ends. Let me repeat that. your new cycle begins the day after your formal assessment ends. So let's say your initial formal assessment was March 12th through March 14th of 2024. Your accreditation cycle then begins March 15th, the day after the last day of your formal assessment. Then let's say that your first reaccreditation, three years later, is April 2nd through April 4th of 2027. Your cycle runs over. All the way through April 4th, that last day of the formal assessment. So March 15th, 2024, through April 4th, the last day of the re-accreditation assessment in 2027. That's your cycle. And on April 5th, congratulations, you're on day one again. Now, this is a super important mindset for accreditation managers because sometimes we treat accreditation like this big giant project. With a beginning and an end. We get ready for the assessment. We survive the assessment. We celebrate. Then eventually start getting ready for the next one. But accreditation doesn't work that way. Not really. It's a cycle. And yes, I know it sounds obvious because that's literally what we call it. But there's a big difference between knowing something and actually managing your accreditation program that way. The day after your assessment. Isn't really the end of something. It's the beginning of the next cycle. Now, does that mean I expect you to show up in the morning after your assessment and immediately archive your assessment in PowerDMS, start a new one and start building files? Absolutely not. Take a win. Celebrate with your team. Take a vacation if you can. Clean your desk, do whatever you need to do. But from an accreditation standpoint, the clock has already started ticking. And I think knowing that can actually make accreditation easier. Because if you think about accreditation as something you continuously maintain instead of something that you periodically prepare for, then you're much less likely to find yourself scrambling as the next assessment approaches. There's another piece of this that can cause confusion. if somebody tells you your agency is on a three-year accreditation cycle, it's really tempting to look at your last assessment date, add exactly three years, and assume that's when your next cycle ends. But assessment dates don't always work that neatly. Let's go back to our example. Remember, the initial assessment ended March 14th, 2024, but the next reaccreditation assessment didn't begin until April 7th. It's a little more than three years, right? Nothing's wrong. The formal assessment simply landed on a slightly different date. And sometimes the shift is much bigger than that. I think all of us who lived through the pandemic. learned that schedules can change dramatically for reasons nobody even anticipated. There can also be extensions or other circumstances that modify your agency's timeline. So rather than getting overly attached to an anniversary date, pay attention to your actual formal assessment dates. Those are the dates that define your cycle. Now, I want to add a practical point here because I don't want you to hear all of this. And then make your accreditation calendar more complicated than it needs to be. If your accreditation cycle starts in April, I am not suggesting that everything in your agency suddenly needs to operate April to April. A lot of things like training already happen when they happen, right? You really have no control over that. And for something like an annual use of force or maybe an annual bias policing, January. Might make the most sense because you can pull the previous calendar years numbers and people's brains work calendar years. So for the reports like that that you have control over, that's my recommendation. Move them all to January. Get them done in January, and then you don't have to worry about them or chase them throughout the year. Plus, if you consistently do it every January, you're still gonna have one completed report within each year of your accreditation cycle. There's no reason to make the calendar harder just because your cycle doesn't conveniently begin on January 1st. the important thing is knowing what your cycle is and making sure that you're meeting those annual requirements within it. And once you know your actual cycle dates, they become incredibly useful for planning. You can look where you are today and ask, where are we at in the cycle? What should we be focusing on right now? What needs to happen before the next assessment? Are we maintaining our files as we go? Or are we allowing work to pile up? That's where understanding the accreditation cycle becomes more than simply knowing the definition. It's a management tool. I also think it helps when communicating with other people in your agency. Now, of course, the accreditation manager lives in this world every day, right? Your command staff probably does not, your accreditation team may not, and the people providing you proofs certainly may not. Giving people some context about where you are in the cycle can help them understand why you're asking for something now instead of waiting until the assessment is right around the corner. And this is where I think accreditation managers can make life so much easier for themselves. Don't manage accreditation exclusively around the assessment. Manage it throughout the cycle. The assessment is certainly important, but it's only one point of a much larger process. If you're doing the work throughout the cycle, the assessment should be validating what you've already been doing, not triggering a mad dash suddenly to do it all of it. Okay. Before I wrap up, I want to leave you with one really, really simple quick win that ties all of this together. If you take a look at what you've named your assessment in PowerDMS, now I've seen assessments called things like CFA assessment, CALEA assessment, assessment 2026. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I'll tell you what I do. I name my assessment inside PowerDMS using the actual dates of the accreditation cycle. So for example, I literally name it December 7th, 2023 to December 6, 2026. Why? Because once you name the assessment that way, those cycle dates are right there across the top of literally every page, every standard in the assessment, as well as That's what it's called on the left-hand navigation column. And it's especially helpful when your assessors are reviewing the files because instead of having to remember what your cycle dates are, or maybe look at a whiteboard or a tent card or ask you, the dates are right there in front of them, literally every page that they are on. It's such a small detail, but details matter in accreditation, right? So that's your quick win for this week. Rename Your assessment using your actual cycle dates. It just takes a minute, and from that point forward, everyone working inside the assessment has the time frame they're reviewing right in front of them. Of course, I also created a companion document called Accreditation Cycles that explains when your cycle begins and ends and gives you an example that you can refer back to. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. So in wrapping this up, thanks so much for listening to another episode of Accreditation Made Easy. If this episode helped you think a little differently about your accreditation cycle or gave you one quick improvement to make inside your assessment, please share it with another accreditation manager who might find it useful. Better yet, share the link to subscribe. It's free to do so. www.accreditationacademy.net forward slash sign up. All right friends, until next time, let's keep making accreditation easy, one step at a time.