If you plunge into a change project without first defining your aim, you and your team are likely to flounder. It's like setting out on a road trip with no clear idea of your final destination. If you have only a vague notion of where you want to end up, you can waste a lot of time and a lot of gas and may decide to just turn around and go home.
A good aim statement keeps you focused on the process you want to improve. It's something you can return to throughout your project, especially when you and your team find yourselves drifting away from your targeted aim.
A good aim statement is specific. It should answer two questions: What are we trying to accomplish? And how will we know if the change is an improvement?
Here's an example: Reduce no-shows to assessment appointments by 50% from an average no-show rate of 80% to 40% by February 1, 2012.
Remember, the aim statement guides your entire change project.
How has a good aim statement helped you and your teams make progress toward your targeted aim?
Check out the Top Ten List for aim statements from the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas: http://www3.mdanderson.org/streams/FullVideoPlayer.cfm?xml=perfImp%2Fconfig%2Fcs138_CFG
A clear aim statement that includes the baseline measure AND target helps the change team know when they’ve reached their goal. A statement that just says improve by x % will make it hard to know when the target's been achieved.
ReplyDeleteAn aim statement with a well-defined measure will also make it possible to compare cycle data with baseline data. The measure needs to be captured in such a way that it’s relative to something else, so it's possible to compare the actual measure over a short time period of time, with the baseline measure, which may have been calculated based on a longer time period.
For example,
1. # of admissions/month (specifies the time period);
2. % of scheduled appointments that were no-shows (relates the number of no-shows to the number of people expected, which may vary from one period to the next);
3. % of total discharges who left within the first 30 days without completing treatment (relates the number of unsuccessful discharges to the total number of discharges in the same period of time).