[MUSIC] Welcome to the application component to module three, where we're learning to put the knowledge into action. In this application you're going to be learning two tools, the organizational readiness assessment, and then the seven step meeting process. Preparing for change. Are you ready? It's important now to do an environment test to find out if your environment or your organization is ready for change. Does your organization recognize a need for an organizational change based on objective outcomes? How do you know? It's important for you to evaluate the desire for the organization to make the change a priority. The tool that you're going to use today for your assignment is the Readiness for Change-Assessment tool, and the tool consists of these nine components. You'll find a template of this tool at the end of this module. We're going to have you use this tool then, to assess your environment and your readiness for change after the completion of this application module. The first change assessment is leadership support. Do you know you have it? How do you know the leadership will support the improvement project that you want to make? Have you created a vision for what you want at the end of this improvement effort? The second process for assessment is the customer focus. Have you defined your customer, and do you understand the customer's perspective? This is imperative in your assessment of readiness for change. The third component is no blame. Are the program outcomes a product of your process and not the people? You want to ensure that the organization supports processes and not people. The fourth component is to rely on data. You need to at this point define your outcomes as a measurement, and then you need to understand your outcomes so that you can do variation analyses. You want to find out, can your organization support the data that you need for your project? The fifth is teams, you want to ensure that your organization will support the fact that you need some team members for this improvement effort, and that they'll provide some inter-professional or inter-disciplinary team members. Sixth, you want to ensure that the organization will support you in involving all levels of employee, so that you can get the project input that you need. As you recall, this will increase your project's success, and this will also level the playing field so that all perspectives can be heard. Seventh, will the organization support your improvement effort by allocating some funds or designating funds for your innovation? Or even designating some funds to reward your team and recognize your improvement efforts? Eighth is to monitor the outcomes. You want to ensure that you have the capacity and the ability to monitor your outcomes or your data over time. And the last component of readiness for change assessment is to celebrate success. It's important that you institute into your processes of your team work and your journey opportunities to celebrate when things go right. Don't wait til the end when the project is over, but really celebrate little successes on the way. This will encourage yourself to continue on and also encourage your team members to continue on. If you had to choose the most critical step, which one would it be? And why do you think that step would be so critical? It may have been hard for you to choose the most critical step for organizational readiness, and you may have come to the conclusion that it really requires many of those steps in order to be successful. So, for the assignment for this week we'd like for you to take the template that is available and think about all of these steps. Think about if you actually have accomplished these steps, and if not, what would it take for you to get that step taken care of? This organizational readiness exercise is going to help you to understand the factors that are going to lead to your improvement success. Now I'd like to transition to another very important tool that you're going to use for your improvement success, specifically related to teamwork and that is running an effective meeting. There is a seven step meeting process that is evidence based. It's a way to standardize your meetings with some structure, and also some evaluation, so that you can ensure that your meetings run smoothly. We all know that every time we meet, if the meeting is ineffective, it causes a lot of frustration. When we're frustrated, we really don't want to have the meetings. And so, we have meeting avoidance. When you institute the seven step meeting process, you're going to find that your meetings run a lot smoother, and that people actually will enjoy coming to the meetings in order to accelerate your improvement process. The first step for effective meetings is to set the stage. When you first get together with your team, it's important to assign roles. Sometimes this is hard to do, because it's not what we're traditionally used to, but you need to assign somebody to be a recorder. Somebody to take notes as to what the next steps are. You also need to assign a time keeper because every agenda that you will now create for every meeting for this project will be timed. For each agenda item you're going to put a time next to that agenda item so that the time keeper will know if we're moving along on that meeting in an efficient way. The timekeeper has to really speak up, so if we're getting sidetracked, the timekeeper has to say, hey we're sidetracked, and get us back on track. Another role that's important is a facilitator, and the facilitator's role is to make sure that everybody is speaking up, that everyone has voice, and also to ensure that we are sticking with the agenda items and not getting sidetracked. The other part of setting the stage is to create those ground rules of which we talked about in the teamwork module. The timekeeper is going to watch the time and alert the group when the time allotted for a particular agenda item is nearly gone. The timekeeper's role is only to inform. Really up to the group, then, to determine and decide if we should continue on, or revise the agenda to accommodate if we're getting off track. The next step in a seven-step meeting process, is to clarify the objective. Here you select the PI method to meet the purpose. Then you need to develop and distribute the timed agenda of which we just discussed. The third step is to review that agenda. Make sure that we all agree that this is the objective of this meeting and that these agenda items are meeting that objective. Next is to work through then the agenda items. Cover one item at a time, manage discussions and maintain focus and pace, and ensure the facilitator is soliciting team participation. If there are points that are ambiguous or unclear, try to clarify those points, and resolve any conflicts that may occur during that meeting section. The next step is to summarize the content of the meeting. Any decisions that were made. Review all the action items. Identify who's doing what, and follow up with the part of that agenda that someone is taking responsibility for. Summarize those responsibilities of each of the team members. And then sixth, develop the agenda for the next meeting. Solicit agenda items for what you're going to talk about next and then review the time and place for the next meeting. And lastly, this is a very important component of the seven step process, the last and seventh step, but that's to evaluate how this meeting went. What went well in the meeting? What could be improved? How could we be better communicators? How could we make better decisions? And then ask the group, are there any remaining questions? This actually is one of the hardest components of the meeting process but it is essential because it's building relationships. It's building trust and respect. It's building a mechanism to improve the meetings so that people get engaged and want to continue coming to the meetings, because if we don't have meetings, improvement processes, improvement efforts don't move along. That completes our application for module three. In this application you learned about two tools. The first tool is the organizational readiness assessment and you're going to be taking that template now and filling it out and completing it for your improvement project. The second tool you learned in this application module was how to run an effective meeting. I'm sure that you will find that these two tools, will be essential in your improvement efforts. [MUSIC]
