CommunicateCoordinateCollaborate

Hawaii Strategy Institute 2011

IntroThe purpose of this presentation is to introduce

you to a methodological approach to support your initiative, project, or activity.

By overlaying the importance of communication, coordination, and collaboration to the work you are already doing, the hope is that you will be able to approach your work in an organized and efficient fashion.

The Shewhart Cycle is one of many methodologies that can be used to develop your project—but the beauty of the tool lies in its simplicity.

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The Shewhart Cycle

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Why are we looking at a Business Process Improvement Methodology?

Because it works.The intention here is not to have you redesign

anything that you’ve already put together.In the next few slides you should be able to see

how adding some fairly minor details to your project plan will benefit you and enable you and your project team to work more effectively with each other.

When you consider the 4 easy phases in the Shewhart Cycle, you will see how natural it becomes to Communicate, Coordinate, and Collaborate.

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The “Planning” PhasePlan – What problem am I trying to solve?

Do I have the resources I will need in order to deliver on time? (Administrative support, data team, web developer, faculty participation, etc)

If not, what is my plan to get there?How will I communicate our progress so that others in

the organization will understand where we are, what we are trying to accomplish, and what our plan is going forward?

How often should we meet and what is the nature of the meetings?

Be sure to set milestones or activity deliverables early on.

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The “Doing” PhaseThis phase involves actually doing what you said

you were going to do in your planning phase.Have your first meeting and collaborate on how

you would like to work together.Discuss ground rules and a distribution list for

communication.Navigate to the website where your plan,

schedule, and meeting minutes are kept so everyone on your project team knows where to go for information and provide a means to communicate.

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The “Checking” PhaseProbably one of the most important phases of all, the

checking phase allows you to take a moment to see if your plan is working as intended.

Are we on track to deliver on our planned milestones or activity deadlines?

Have we done a good job at actively seeking feedback by communicating with those from our project teams?

What can we do to improve our existing process?Do we have the organizational accountability in place

to clearly define our roles as originally intended?

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The “Act” PhaseAs the name of the phase implies, the Act phase is

where you take what you have learned from the Check phase and integrate the changes/improvements back into your process. (Think summative assessment)

This does not complete the cycle—it merely returns you to the Planning phase where you update your plan in a cycle of continuous improvement.

Without improving the process you can expect that you will continue to experience less than optimum results from your work, and the work from your team.

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Communicate-Coordinate-Collaborate

Communicate-Marketing the work your team is doing on your

campus is paramount to developing the buy-in you will need to be successful. Here are some tips:

Post your meeting schedule and minutes on your AtD website so everyone will know what progress has been made. A short bulleted list is sufficient to highlight what was accomplished and who was in attendance.

Email a quick recap of all significant meeting minutes to the entire campus—let them know you are immersed in this important work.

If you are working on an intervention and only tracking a handful of students—that’s fine. Be sure to cc your IR so that they know what you are doing.

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Communicate-Coordinate-Collaborate

Coordinate—The core team on your campus has a huge job

of coordinating numerous working groups and ensuring that they are cross-pollinating in order to share ideas.

Do what you can to help facilitate the coordination of various groups.

We are all the “eyes” of this initiative. If you see something that is not working, be sure to bring it to the attention of your core team leads so that issues are quickly resolved.

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Communicate-Coordinate-Collaborate

Collaboration –Collaboration is what happens when people come

together to work on a shared interest, in our case the interest is student success.

Collaboration works best when each individual feels that the work at hand has been well planned, appropriately resourced, and attended by all.

Collaborative work can be a very satisfying aspect of our jobs if we truly embrace the essence of why we were brought together—to get it done.

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Final Thoughts…The most valuable resource you have access to in the

Achieving the Dream Initiative are the people involved in its implementation.

The best data in the world will not help you if your people are not talking.

Take the time to develop and maintain good working relationships with everyone on your project team.

The success of your initiative will be a reflection of how well your team communicates with one another.

Aloha!

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