Quality Improvement Zone

We often use meetings to communicate, make key decisions and review progress of projects with project teams or key stakeholders. To help you make meetings focused and productive use The 7 Step Meeting Process.

Run charts are one of the most useful tools in quality improvement projects.  They allow us to look at data over time, understand any patterns or trends, assess whether there are changes occurring and provide a mechanism to monitor what is happening.

The PDSA tracker tool is a method to display your change theory and change ideas.  It contains summary information on change theory, links to driver diagram, measures, tasks that need to be done and PDSA learning.

With any QI project there will be risks and potential unintended consequences; always look to include balancing measures in a measurement plan to take account of these.  For other associated risks that aren’t covered by your balancing measures it is useful to keep a risk log and check these at meetings.

When working in complex social systems it is crucial to build knowledge around suitability and effectiveness of changes being tested.  Frequent review-time should be built into your project plan (i.e. daily, weekly or fortnightly) which focuses specifically on the knowledge that is being built through PDSA testing and takes account of any new knowledge or changes in conditions.  Rigorous use of PDSA methodology and recording learning either in PDSA learning logs or a lessons learned log are fundamental to the success of your project.  

As well as a lessons learnt log, it is useful to evaluate your communication plan to find out what has worked.  This learning on what has worked this time will help you make your communication plan even better next time around.  Think about the following questions as a team:

• Did you identify the right audiences? Was anyone missing? Were the audiences identified too narrow or too broad?
• Was the purpose of your communication correct?
• How did your audiences react to your messages? Did they act on them in the way you intended them to?
• What about your stories? Did they have the impact you expected? Do people remember the stories?
• How did the communication channels work? Did you reach the right people?
• What would you do differently next time?

Huddles are a structured communication method for teams to review and discuss project activity.  It is helpful to hold this at a set time either on a daily or weekly basis; it supports communication around factors contributing to performance and address any barriers to project progress.

A visual management board is a method to visually display project work.  It contains information on strategic priorities, measures, data charts and active improvement work.  This tool provides a mechanism for conducting daily or weekly huddles.

• 7 Step Meeting Process
• Run Charts
• SPC Charts
• Pareto Charts
• Risk Log
• Lessons Learnt Log