BRING CHANGE TO LIFE

Implementation

Child welfare staffing

Managed teams of operations, personnel, technology and marketing people that redesigned the hiring process for child protection staff. Moved candidate sourcing to the web, created a novel self-screening process, established competency-based hiring, and launched an innovative marketing campaign. The changes doubled job applications, attracted people far more suited for the work, helped cut attrition in half, and strengthened morale. New York Times article

Child development merger

Merged community-based child care and Head Start programs. Provided common year-round calendars, longer hours of service, unified classrooms, better trained staff, common intake processes, support services for all families, universal parent involvement, and consolidated contracts. The project served as a model for system-wide child development integration.

IT system implementation

Rolled out a massive new welfare information system to 60 field locations, meeting an aggressive implementation schedule while protecting client benefits and reducing errors.

New health care model

Designed and implemented transitional care services in several acute care hospitals, lowering readmissions, improving care and strengthening hospital bottom lines. Transitional Care Unit Implementation

Physician practice acquisition

Led acquisition and merger of independent pediatric practices into a large multi-disciplinary practice. Negotiated deals and integrated operations, improving margins for both sides and enabling acquired practices to provide high quality care without financial worry.

Spur turnaround

Performance

Child care restructuring

Restructured eligibility operations for a large child development program. Redesigned workflow to create team-based processing units; built a staffing model; updated the program’s website to streamline applications and eliminate in-person service, and created a workflow tracking system – reduced staffing by 25-30 percent without disrupting service. 

Human services staffing models

Built activity-based staffing models for the nation’s largest SNAP (Food Stamps) and cash assistance programs. Completed work observation surveys, combined survey data with information on case volume and work hours available to estimate the number of staff required, and built a common technical platform for both models. The models guide productivity, support new hiring, and estimate the impact of operational changes on staffing patterns. 

Hospital financial turnaround

Led a team that assessed financial conditions and set improvement targets, aligned fractious hospital leaders around the targets, and completed revenue cycle, productivity, surgical scheduling, purchasing and other turnaround work that improved the financial margin by nearly eight percent and strengthened the leadership team markedly.

Hiring breakthroughs

Led two projects that eliminated serious backlogs in hiring. For a hospital with a 25 percent vacancy rate, high overtime, excessive use of temporary staff, and low morale, organized marketing, open houses, expedited screening and on-the-spot job offers that yielded 83 new staff in 30 days. For a parks program, led a breakthrough team that compressed a five-month hiring timeframe by more than half.

Health and human services shared services

Built a shared services strategy for seven large public health and human services agencies. Integrated activities to increase revenue, streamline audits, improve employee discipline, and save $15-20 million from shared purchasing. Shared services press release

Child care redesign

Created an operating strategy for a large early care and education program, including improvements in eligibility, enrollment, compliance, integrity, quality, payment processes and technology. Recommended program goals and designed improvement projects and implementation plans that the program adopted wholeheartedly.

Grow commitment and capacity

Culture

Competency-based staffing

Created competency-based staffing programs for child protection, adult protection, juvenile justice, health homes, substance abuse treatment, and homeless housing programs. Designed competency models to identify requirements for the jobs in these programs, prepared behavioral interviewing routines to detect the competencies, and trained staff to use the models and interviews to screen for the right candidates. The changes strengthened performance, improved morale and reduced attrition. Competency-based staffing brief

Leadership alignment

Helped integrate a juvenile justice program into a larger children’s agency. Assessed work culture and leadership alignment through surveys and interviews, reviewed business plans, and facilitated a two-day retreat to resolve strategic and leadership differences and convert business plans into implementation projects. Established a language and structure that leadership used daily and built commitment to strengthen teamwork, develop staff and improve morale.

Workforce strategies

Created workforce strategies for two human services programs. Used staff surveys, interviews and focus groups to assess working conditions and their implications for agency operations. Facilitated leadership retreats that shaped workforce strategies and defined leadership roles to strengthen and support middle managers, improve staff competencies and behaviors, and strengthen supervision. Restorative Staffing

Organizational strategy

Assessed an urban parks program’s organizational structure and systems to hasten decision making, develop operations strategies and link them to financial strategies, and strengthen human resources, technology and other supports. Prepared plans to accomplish this, including leadership changes and new operations management practices adopted by the program, which have unified and improved operations practices across the program.

Staff retention

Analyzed the causes of high attrition among the ranks of child protective specialists. Interviewed leaders, held focus groups and surveyed people who resigned. Identified what attracts people to the work, why they stay and why they leave, and created a blueprint to attract and retain the type of people required for this difficult work – which the agency adopted and implemented, strengthening the work culture and reducing attrition as a result. Stemming the tide of attrition