August Workshop: Budgeting & Financial Plans....ughhhh

Well there was a slight change of plans and this week the workshop schedule was changed and lucky us had the very dull topic of financial planning and budgets. I'm not sure how this topic can be delivered in an interesting and relevant way but I certainly found it extremely boring and poorly prepared. It would have been more relevant if a team member could have presented it to us and shown us an actual budget and balance statement. 

ipad_team.jpg

This great article on the mind tools website, pretty much covers everything that we learnt. I may need more Excel training down the track. 

However it did make me think about my personal spending habits and how bad I am at sticking to the family budget. 

Following the workshop my project team got together and nutted out the next phase of our project. It is really great having such a great team of people to work with. My job is to finish off the literature review. So I must schedule this in. 

Culture, delegation, and stuff.

Well, my head is spinning trying to collate and make a report from 2 different drafts so thought I would review what I have learnt lately: 

I just came across this article and thought these 6 points are so relevant to all of our work. I think I need to find ways to train staff in the 'soft' skills. These are the things that I often call personality, but in doing this I am allowing myself to think I cannot influence and support that person and I am not giving the person the feedback they need to learn and develop. For example when a person has anxiety about their work and has a tendency to be a perfectionist, preventing them from working effectively, I need to be helping them to develop strategies to make faster decision and allow them the time at a later date to refine the work. 

I had a great session with my manager on Monday and he imparted information about another great tool to use to help lead and manage: the RACI model to help delegate tasks. He uses this all the time and once he makes someone responsible he then checks to make sure that the action occurs, remaining accountable. It is probably useful to think like this when sending info to the team- who needs to know? How should I manage this information? Often people are overloaded with information emails and therefore they are unable to use and absorb the information. 

http://thepaceofservice.com/is-your-social-media-strategy-raci/

So I have left the meeting with a few new responsibilities. 

I have been interested in the ways that some of my colleagues are working. As a team leader I seem (although this hasn't been identified) to need to be on top of what everyone is doing. I work with a number of female colleagues that have recently moved from India to Australia to work and my manager is a man of Indian background (although he did not grow up in India). I came across the work of psychologist Dr Geert Hofstede today and his website here provides his understanding of culture based on  five demensions. It is really interesting to look at the differences between India and Australia, especially in the area of power/ dominance and I have noticed the formal attitudes my colleagues have towards our manager. I thought this may be  because he is a man and the more patriachial society they have come from, however reading this has made me think that it is more about power. Where some of the team have an equal and jovial relationship with the manager, he often chooses to set himself apart from the team. I thought that this was his way of keeping a distance so it is easier to have the difficult performance review type conversations, but the work of Hofstede has been useful in providing me with alternative view points.   

I am entering overwhelm again so today I will take the time to do a mind sweep and schedule in time to complete all the tasks that I need to do. Returning to using the time management tools I am familiar with. I know that consistency is not my strength and I need to revisit tools and keep consciously using them to develop new habits. 

I am looking forward to the workshop next week, especially as the topic is Teamwork. 

Project chug-chug

Well it is with great relief that I write this post knowing that I've just collated all the information from our journal searches. The literature review so far, although brief is informative, which considering the lack of literature available is quite exciting. It has been rewarding sitting at the computer this morning just writing and summarising. The literature also validates all of our own opinions about providing training to direct support workers. we need to make sure they have the underpinning values and attitudes, then the skills and knowledge, then mindfulness training, and time to apply to the individual using person centred planning and then onsite support, mentoring and supervision.  So it seems that there is no point doing any training if you are not doing all of this. Wow, this makes training an expensive exercise - not what the execs want to hear! 

Oooh, I like this article about mindfulness. 

Thoughts from July workshop - Customer Service

It's funny I hear the words customer service and start feeling very guilty. I think as therapists we often feel guilty if we haven't been able to find the time to provide the service that we think someone needs. We are often stretched very thin and respond to the most urgent cries for help, leaving the quieter families waiting for us to call them. 

Todays workshop gave me 3 great tools to help in my role to provide good customer service. 
1. Empathy Mapping
2. Journey Mapping 
3. The FISH philosophy


Empathy Mapping. I think this is something that I do quite intuitively. Although actually writing it down helps. Maslow's Hierarchy of needs has been adapted to think about customer service. WIth basic needs as the bottom of the pyramid before the expectations, desires, and unanticipated needs. 

http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/27/maslows-hierarchy-of-customer-service/

Here is an empathy map:

http://uxempathy.com/2012/10/digital-empathy-map/

Our group actually found using this quite tricky. It is really hard to see all of these things from someone else's persepective. It would be great to ask one of our clients to fill this in for us. 

A Journey Map follows on from an empathy map, in that it is done from the customers perspective and maps out every touchpoint that the customer has with your service. 

http://www.amplify-interactive.com/blog/events/love-at-first-website-2011/

I found this website with more details. 

customer journey mapping: 10 tips for beginners

We worked in teams to create journey maps and this was a really valuable experience and will help us develop some more streamlined processes and procedures to be followed. 

We also talked about tracking the clients satisfaction using a customer heartbeat diagram. 

 This website has lots of good info about customer satisfaction. 

And lastly this is how we finished off the day. 

http://www.charthouse.com/content.aspx?name=home2

I am looking forward to trying to apply some of these tools to work. 

Rhythms and routines: the link between time management and lifespace theory

Reviewing my self management
I found a review of this book 
http://99u.com/workbook/16527/why-emailing-gives-you-a-false-sense-of-progress

I'd be interested to read the book and it has reminded me to review how I am going with my time management. I re-did the time management test here and scored much higher. Last month I scored 40 this month I scored 46, right on the cusp to a score of effective time management. Procrastination and managing interruptions are still areas I need to work on but there has definitely been an improvement by just trying to meet my goals, scheduling better and trying to be accountable to my team and manager. Yay for me :)

Project

Our project seems to be swimming along nicely thanks to my great team who are so motivated. I am enjoying the work as we made did a good job with the proposal and thus developed realistic goals and tasks. It is so clear and so able to focus on one task at a time. Its great doing some EBP for the first time in a while. 

In my search for relevant articles about training DSWs to support adults with autism I found a theory that is used in residential child care called "lifespace", ·       “Lifespace theory suggests that everyday life events, from getting children up in the morning to putting them to bed at night offers opportunities which can be as powerful as more formal interventions to enhance children’s development”.    “Lifespace can be described as the therapeutic use of daily life events in residential settings…Daily life events, which are shared by care staff and young people in residential settings, are exploited by the care team to help the young people gain an understanding of their life experiences. This understanding then becomes the foundation from which support is given to the young person to help him/her gain control over his/her daily environment” (   M Smith 2005 “Working in the Lifespace” in “In Residence” Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.)

This theory is encompassed in what we call the keyworker model in ECIS and therapy in the natural envionrments. I think we can also apply this to adults in residential care. This theory has been adapted for career development here and I think it would be useful to apply to my own career development. SO i might explore this further. 

Do it Better: Thoughts from the June workshop

20th June 2013

I enjoyed this workshop and now need to think about how we can implement continuous improvement. I think most members of our team are good at trying to find more effective processes and there are only a few people who do things because they've always been done that way and are resistant to change. As a team we share ideas about how to work more effectively, how to manage time and caseloads and think we need to keep doing this on a regular basis. There are not enough processes/ policies in place to make sure everyone know what is expected so I will work on these, then we can measure performance based on this.

(Taken from http://sarjeevansainbhi.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoid=136220067)

In this cycle it is important to move quickly to the next step and not get stuck planning. It is an ongoing cycle for continuous improvement.

We can also use the theory of Kaizen; the Japanese term meaning to 'change gently' which means we should build on changes bit by bit for continuos improvement.

It was also good to think about how a team can be innovative and I like the idea of developing a challenge statement and thinking about what do our customers want more of? There needs to be a benefit to any work we do and there needs to be value in it for somebody who matters! It would be excellent to sit down as a team and brainstorm answers to a challenge statement like "In what ways can we work in mainstream schools?" I know we'd come up with heaps of stuff.

Project reflections: We are up to executing - this is where I need to knuckle down and get that reading done. We're working really well as a group.

I had the opportunity to sit with my manager and a colleague to come up with a project proposal relevant to my role. I found it really difficult to put his into the project proposal format and this is where I left it. I am looking forward to being able to talk through this further with my manager and seeing if we can expand the project.

I think our team is at a stage where we are looking to develop more consistent and more effective processes and it has been useful to think about processes and ways to develop a philosophy of continual improvement.

The Literature Review. PICO and databases...eeek

30th May 2013

As part of our project Emily, Val and I are conducting a literature search. We are lucky that recently a guide has been developed by our organisation to do this. One of the ways to develop a good research question is to use the acronym PICO. There are lots of good sites explaining this however I am wondering how relevant it is to our research when using PICO is most effective for medical and patient based searches.
Here is a great link explaining how to use PICO to formulate a research question
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/file/0011/85196/Finding-the-Evidence-1.swf
And here is another link to a worksheet for PICO http://www.usc.edu/hsc/ebnet/ebframe/PICO%20Worksheet%20SS.pdf

Well as a team and with the experience Val and Emily had in already trying to use PICO we came up with a great question and PICO for search terms.

THE PICO SYSTEM

WHAT DO I WANT TO KNOW (Practice Question):   What education do dsw need to support people with **

Area	Terms	Alternate Terms
Population	People with ** and living in supported accommodation	Alternate terms for each client group Residential services, residential facilities, institutions, group homes, facility, share home/house, nursing home, continuing care unit, transition unit, in home care, out of home care, respite care, day centre, day service, day programs
Intervention/ Exposure	Education or training for direct support workers	Staff education, staff training, competency based training, upskilling, professional development, learning needs, accreditation, disability support workers Support workers, residential worker, attendant carer, staff carer, personal care assistants, worker,
Comparison/Factor
Outcome/Observation	quality of life, stress, incident reports, wellbeing, job satisfaction, staff turnover, absenteeism, illness, least restrictive environment	Participation, independence,

 ** Autism or mental health conditions or BOC

So tonight I have tried to follow the guide and search databases. It was so so difficult to access the databases. Having access to a uni library I found it much easier to just get on to the cochrane database and do my search. Once I had access the searching was easy, the terms we had come up with helped and I started finding articles that seem a little bit relevant. So now lots of reading to do!