Change Project 911 In Review

Thank you for coming along on this Change Project 911 journey with Mat Roosa, the guest blogger for the series. Below you will find a list of all the Change Project 911 NIATx series with a short blurb. Select the title to read the full content of each blog.

Help! My Project is Dragging on Too Long

Posted December 29, 2020

Change projects are not meant to be open-ended. They’re meant to move quickly and efficiently to extract the maximum benefits. Dave Gustafson, who developed the NIATx model, recommends limiting change projects to no more than a few weeks. Some change projects can be completed successfully in as little as a day. If you find your team in the middle of a never-ending project, try to diagnose the root cause that’s derailing the project.
Any one of these underlying problems could make a change project drag on. . .

Help! My Change Team has lost its energy!

Posted February 10, 2021

Sometimes a change team can feel like a phone with only 2 percent battery life left. Some teams start with a full charge that drains through time. Other teams get started with a lower level of energy and go downhill from there. The challenge of COVID-19 and other competing priorities and stressors can quickly diminish a change team’s energy and divert attention from the change project. The fix. . .

Help! Our change project is unmanageable!

Posted March 15, 2021

Basket or cart?

It’s the first decision we usually make when we enter a large grocery store. When I am just buying a few items, I usually pick up a basket so that I can move more easily through the store. Often I find myself with a gallon of milk in one hand, an overflowing too heavy basket in the other, and wondering why I did not get a cart in the first place. So, what can we do to keep from overloading the process?. . .

What to Do When the Idea Well Has Run Dry

Posted April 8, 2021

Generating change ideas requires time and energy. Teams lose momentum when initial change efforts don’t succeed, and then struggle to develop option B (or C) to continue their improvement efforts. As teams attempt to move multiple priorities forward, they lose energy to exploring new ideas. Worst case scenario? They feel like just giving up and tolerating the problematic status quo.

So what is a busy team with limited resources to do? How can your team develop a new vision? The five ideas that follow can help organizations to generate new ideas to get the change process moving again. . .

 

The Incomplete Walk-through

Posted May 24, 2021

Understand and involve the customer.

This is the first and most important of the five NIATx principles. Much of our NIATx work involves working to understand the customer/client/patient experience—because the customer experience is the critical factor in all service delivery. Strategies to understand and involve the customer can include client interviews, focus groups, or including clients on a change team. . .

Counting what Counts: Addressing the challenge of incomplete data collection

Posted July 23, 2021 

“Help! We don’t know if our change is an improvement!”

At the foundation of all quality improvement work lies data.

Imagine driving down a twisty road at night and having your headlights turned off for a portion of the journey. That’s what happens when we try to manage a change project without consistent data access. It can be helpful to think about the data needed to steer a change in three stages:. . .

When Your Rapid-cycle PDSA is Not Working

Posted August 26, 2021 

Rapid-Cycle Plan-Do-Study-ACT (PDSA) is a powerful tool for improvement that can enable a team or organization to achieve its short-term goals and move toward long-term success. But sometimes, PDSA change cycles do not yield the desired results. Here are a few questions to consider when your change project does not achieve the goal. . .

Help! How do we deal with change project interruptions?

Posted September 17, 2021

Maintaining forward momentum on top priorities

Once your team has developed a change project and you have strong executive support, it might seem like things should be smooth sailing. But there are a number of ways that a strong project can be blown off course. . .

Customers don’t notice improvements

Posted October 18, 2021

How do we know if a change is an improvement?

Change teams and change leaders ask this question frequently. It often refers to the measures and data they’re using to monitor change results.

But there is another and perhaps more meaningful way to ask this question: How do our customers know that a change is an improvement? . . .

Unable to sustain a change

Posted November 19, 2021 

“It’s easy to quit drinking. I’ve done it a thousand times.”   W.C. Fields

Change is easy. Sustaining change is not so easy. This is true for personal changes like quitting smoking, exercising more, driving slower, or keeping the house more organized. It is also true for workplace systems changes, such as implementing new policies and procedures. Too often, despite our best intention, we end up like Sisyphus, doing our best to roll the change up the hill, only to see it slide back down. . .

No Time for a Change Project: Finding Time vs. Making Choices

Posted January 3, 2022

Why do so many good change ideas end up at the bottom of the pile? Why do most teams struggle to find the time, energy, and people to implement change projects? Many teams are convinced that they cannot control the urgent needs, staffing and fiscal resource demands, and other obstacles that get in the way of change implementation.  This might be because they are asking the wrong question. . .

About our Guest Blogger

                                                 

Mat Roosa, LCSW-R was a founding member of NIATx and has been a NIATx coach for a wide range of projects. He works as a consultant in quality improvement, organizational development and planning, and implementing evidence-based practices. His experience includes direct clinical practice in mental health and substance use services, teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and human service agency administration. You can reach Mat (Change Project SOS) at matroosa@gmail.com.

Change Project 911: No Time for a Change Project: Finding Time vs. Making Choices

Mat Roosa, LCSW-R
NIATx Coach

“The change seems like a good idea, but we just don’t have the time to do it. Let’s come back to this next year when we have more resources."

No time for a change project:
Finding time vs. making choices

Why do so many good change ideas end up at the bottom of the pile? Why do most teams struggle to find the time, energy, and people to implement change projects? Many teams are convinced that they cannot control the urgent needs, staffing and fiscal resource demands, and other obstacles that get in the way of change implementation.  This might be because they are asking the wrong question.

 

Instead of asking, “Do we have the time to take on this new project?” teams and leaders should be asking, “Which projects should we choose?”.

 

While we may be short on time, we can choose how we’ll spend it. The four steps below can help you choose which project to pursue. Apply these strategies to both current and potential projects periodically to ensure that you create time for the critical projects and let go of the rest.  

1. Consider the return on investment of a potential change project before implementing the change.
2. Prioritize a manageable number of activities for action to ensure that you have the resources to complete the change project successfully.
3. Cultivate urgency within your team to foster focus and action.
4. Use tested practices to unite the team and sustain action to implement the project.

ROI: Understanding pros and cons and the value of the change

In keeping with a motivational Interviewing model, we are all ambivalent about most of our decisions. This includes decisions to invest in change projects. It can be helpful to use a decision balance exercise with your team regarding the pros and cons of moving forward with the change project. How valuable will this change project be for our team?

Priority: If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Once you have determined a strong ROI for completing a change, then you need to find a way to make it happen. Most of us have too many priorities and struggle to move them forward in a timely fashion. There are only so many projects that you and your team can complete successfully, and that number is probably smaller than you think it is. To succeed with a change implementation, we need to decide what we want to do. We also need to decide what needs to come off our list to ensure that the priority projects are completed.  

Urgency: the burning platform

Most of us, most of the time, have a bias toward the status quo. Unless there is a convincing reason to change, we tend to favor options that we know over those less familiar. Known things are more comfortable, even when they are not useful, or even dangerous. New and unknown things are stressful, even when they are likely to provide us with great benefits.

Change requires a felt sense of urgency. Many have used the story of the burning platform to understand the importance of urgency. Imagine that you are on a platform in the ocean, a mile from the shore. You are told that you need to jump into the water and swim to shore. You will likely hesitate and consider all the risks related to this swim. Will you be hurt jumping off the high platform? Can you swim that far? Is there a current? Are their sharks in the water? Etc.

Now imagine that the platform is on fire, and flames are spreading toward the edge where you stand. You may pause briefly, but then you will jump and do your best to swim toward the shore. 

The challenge of urgency is that most of us do not experience the clear danger of a burning platform. The need for change is rarely as obvious as when the window of opportunity to make beneficial changes has closed. Leaders need to understand the risks of inaction and the rewards for action and communicate these in a way that cultivates urgency for the team. Leaders should never “light a fire” to get their team to jump, but they need to be able to point to the obvious risks of inaction.  

Tested Practices: Do what works to find the time. 

Once you have found a project with a high ROI, and have cultivated urgency for this new priority, you are ready to implement the change. Effective team implementation requires that you:  

• Collaborate with the team to harness the energy and skills of a diverse group. 
• Delegate elements of the project to ensure team engagement and to spread responsibility so that the project is more manageable. 
• Use existing infrastructures such as staff meetings and supervisory processes to steer the change project. This prevents the need to find additional time to work on the project. 

There is always time for the most valuable priorities. Hopefully these ideas will help you define priority changes and then take action to get them done.

Planning a change project in 2022? 

A key role in the NIATx model is the Change Leader. Teams are also encouraged to assign a data coordinator, who gathers and presents the change project data. The Sustain Leader plays another key role for Change Teams. Assigning a  Sustain Leader responsible for creating a sustainment plan is the clearest path to making sustaining the change a priority for your team.

Join an upcoming NIATx Change Leader Academy! View the complete 2022 NIATx Change Leader Academy Training Schedule.

About Change Project 911

Change Project 911 is a monthly blog post series covering common change project barriers and how to address them. Has your change project hit a snag that you’re not sure to tackle? Share your issue in the comments section below, or email Change Project 911 at matroosa@gmail.comWe’ll offer solutions from our team of change project experts!

About our Guest Blogger

                                                 

Mat Roosa was a founding member of NIATx and has been a NIATx coach for a wide range of projects. He works as a consultant in quality improvement, organizational development and planning, and implementing evidence-based practices. His experience includes direct clinical practice in mental health and substance use services, teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and human service agency administration. You can reach Mat (Change Project SOS) at matroosa@gmail.com.