What is healthcare globalization?

The healthcare industry is facing economic challenges. As the population ages, healthcare spending increases and the supply is outweighing the demand. This is leading to economic challenges that are difficult to solve in the current environment.

Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity has been a trend in healthcare for the past decade. Now, however, we are starting to see this industry consolidating at an international level. Well-known North American healthcare systems such as Partners Continuing Care, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins and more are purchasing or partnering with health systems in other countries. We are seeing this at a much larger scale than we’ve seen in the past.

For instance, Boston-based Steward Health Care is now the primary health system of the entire country of Malta. This is in addition to 39 community hospitals in the US.

Moreover, if we look at the combined company RL Datix, they will now have a foothold in over 19 countries around the world. Interestingly, this international growth was not attributed to new sales regions, but rather to the global expansion of their existing clients.

Why is the healthcare industry going global?

Scaling Up to Stay Afloat

Like many other industries today, scaling up is a primary business goal and often involves expanding a company’s geographic footprint to obtain more sources of revenue. Some may consider the healthcare industry to be public and non-for-profit, but that is not true in one of the biggest economies in the world — the USA. Healthcare spending in the USA alone accounts for about $3.7 Trillion per year with annual growth rates of about 4.1% (source).

“US health spending now exceeds USD $3 trillion per year, with growth rates projected to accelerate through 2024. Major spending categories are led by hospital care (USD $1 trillion), physicians (USD $634.9 billion), and prescription drugs (USD $328.6 billion).” — (Source 1)

Despite the increased spending, profit margins are not growing proportionally. As such, health system CEOs need to look for other sources of revenue to offset the rising costs:

“We have to look outside our traditional world if we’re going to survive,”

- Randy Oostra, president and CEO of ProMedica told Wall Street Journal

Mutually Beneficial Partnerships

International health systems are not as well-versed in healthcare quality and access as their North American counterparts are. In order to learn from methods that have been proven successful, other countries encourage north american brands to take on the healthcare challenges in their regions. For instance, the quote below was taken from an annual UAE Healthcare Sector Report calling out some of their successful new partners:

“Collaboration with international brands such as Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic … made quality health care more accessible.”- UAE Healthcare Sector report

Regulatory Push for Universal Quality Care

The WHO published their Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and among them was to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) including financial protection, access to quality essential health-care services and affordable medicines and vaccines for all. (Source 2) This is an extremely lofty goal considering the current state of healthcare quality and access among low and middle income countries.

Firstly, there are roughly 2 Billion people in the world that live in extreme adversity with absolutely no access to healthcare (Source 3). To compound this problem, there is little research on these extreme conditions to support WHO’s goal of universal access.

Second, without government buy-in to UHC, accessing health services could bring individuals into extreme poverty. Recent research indicates that 800 million people a year spend at least 10% of their income on healthcare expenses(source). It will be extremely challenging to solve access issues without introducing single payer healthcare systems supported by international governments.

“26% of physicians favor a single payer health system, 35.5% favor single payer with a private insurance option, and 27% favor a market-driven system” (Source)

Finally, not all healthcare services are created equal. Fraud and Abuse in healthcare has hit record highs in recent years due to improvements in fraud detection technologies. In some cases, patients are treated with high risk procedures for diagnoses that were never positive to begin with. One example was Dr. Farid Fata, who plead guilty to giving cancer treatments to misdiagnosed patients, telling some they had a terminal blood cancer called multiple myeloma. He pleaded guilty to 13 counts of Medicare fraud, one count of conspiracy to pay or receive kickbacks and two counts of money laundering (source).

More recently, a physician plead guilty to a $60M fraud scheme prescribing morphine and hydromorphone to at-risk patients, resulting in accelerated deaths (source).

This is a concern that will be compounded as health systems scale into emerging markets that dont offer the same protections to patients that we see in North America. We can expect that some of these systems will be acquiring liability beyond their control.

Moreover, in many developing countries healthcare is completely unregulated and decentralized. Brazil, for instance is recovering from historically low access to healthcare with a completely decentralized model of universal healthcare access. Municipalities provide free health care that is funded by the states and federal government. However, this model is difficult to control and to predict future expenditures. As such, it is a risky market to break into and may be why we are not seeing major healthcare systems in that market yet.

In Summary

The healthcare industry already deals with complex challenges of fragmented leadership, siloed delivery, and poor adoption of technology. Now, the industry must shift its business focus to maintain positive profit margins in an economy that cannot support itself. In order to stay in the black, healthcare organizations are expanding to global markets, introducing challenges that may bring more harm than good.

As an optimist, I want to say that access to affordable and quality healthcare will become a global human right in the next decade. As a realist, however, I doubt that we will ever get there.

1. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) “NHE Tables” and “Historical and Projections 1960–2024” National Health Expenditure Projections, 2016–25: Health Affairs
2. SDG3: Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages. http://www.who.int/sdg/targets/en/. Accessed September 17, 2018
3. Berwick D, Snair M, Nishtar S. Crossing the Global Health Care Quality ChasmA Key Component of Universal Health Coverage. JAMA. Published online August 31, 2018. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.13696

Healthcare Globalization was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t hurt me, heal me, be nice to me.

While healthcare executives grapple daily with balancing tight budgets against optimal patient outcomes, an obvious question may arise “where does accountability fall, stakeholders or shareholders”?

In this context, the shareholders being the executives who must handle the day to operations of a healthcare organization, and the stakeholders being the recipients of care. In most cases, both goals converge. Where this balancing act becomes more complex is instances when they diverge, sometimes widely.

The role infection risks play in achieving patient experience

For Healthcare providers, the best patient outcomes from every contact is that goal we all strive to attain, guided by internal and external regulatory requirements, best practices ongoing research and more. However, limited resources are a clear and present constraint that overarches all our efforts.

A quick review of this complex landscape illustrates just a few of the risks to be navigated and managed:

1. The growth of antibiotic resistance

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, told The Washington Post in 2016 that, “The end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics — that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive care units, or patients getting urinary tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics.”

The growing threat of antibiotic resistance is a challenge to exactly what patients expect from their healthcare providers: to get better and not experience harm. In fact, behaviors that support antimicrobial stewardship may be at odds with patient expectations.

2. The challenges of healthcare team transitions

JAMA published a study that concluded, “Among patients submitted to internal medicine services in 10 Veterans Affairs hospitals, end-of-rotation transition in care was associated with significantly higher in-mortality.” Research like this spark important conversations about ensuring consistency in quality of care.

3. The nature of emerging diseases

In 2015 the World Health Organization began releasing the list of Blueprint priority diseases. The list identifies and prioritizes pathogens that have epidemic potential and therefore pose the greatest public health risk. Combined with headline-making emerging diseases like Zika and Ebola, the conversation about managing these growing public health concerns is changing.

This is only a few items on an increasingly long list that also includes discussions about data and transparency in healthcare, reprocessing and sterilization issues of healthcare equipment and much more. In the daily grapple of healthcare prioritization, balancing these competing concerns is no small task.

Infection prevention and patient outcomes

The IHI Triple Aim focuses on improving the patient experience of care, population health and reducing per capita cost as a unitary goal.

Today improved healthcare data collection and data analytics coupled with evolving regulatory benchmarking requirements lends more insight into what factors impact patient experience and influence their decision of where and how to receive care.

From this holistic approach, conversations have started about what information patients should have about risks like HAIs and even what, if any, role patients can play as partners in infection prevention. As health seeking behavior becomes more informed it may be more common for patients to want answers to questions like:

• What are the infection rates for intended procedure?

• What types and number of HAI cases have been reported for the index facility?

• What policies, audits and actions take place to combat HAI at the facility?

• What are the facility’s infection rates compared to the state and national averages?

The answers to these questions are progressively becoming more available in the public domain, and the impact of these answers cannot be overstated.

The CDC estimates that one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection — it’s not difficult to imagine how this might impact a patient’s experience in a healthcare setting. The toll of HAIs is significant; the more than 1.7 million HAIs estimated to occur each year according to the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) are associated with 99,000 deaths and costs over $28 billion.

The question then becomes, what strategies can be put into place to not only mitigate the emerging challenges in infection prevention but also to moderate their effect on the patient experience?

Radical + Logic is the home of the RL Solutions team’s big ideas about healthcare, technology and more. But for the latest in healthcare news and trends, check out our resource center.

How Do HAIs Impact Patient Experience? was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The language we use in our communication is so incredibly important — what you say might be different to what the other person hears, and vice versa. So get into the habit of paraphrasing.

I call this “drive-through” communication because it’s very similar to what we do when we order something at a drive-through window; we ask for something, and before we receive our order, the vendor makes sure they understand what we want by repeating what they thought they heard.

In this clip from a recent seminar on the Essentials of Project Scheduling, I demonstrate the dilemma that can easily occur without drive-through communication. Check it out, and don’t be caught in this Coconut Donut Dilemma!

The Coconut Donut Dilemma was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve come a long way since my student days. I used to be that student sitting in the library, dreading reading chapters for my courses. Now, I read for pleasure. Reading opens my mind up to creative thinking. As part of my job, it also provides me the knowledge I need to stay on top of industry trends.

I consider myself to be a slow reader. Though I’ve always loved the idea of reading, I had never been able to commit myself to it.

When I transitioned into a Product Marketing role I quickly realized that one of the core elements of my job description is “being in the know.” That meant reading. A lot of reading. But what better way to get that information than to read up on daily news, market trends, and interesting books that help your understanding of ideas, audience and concepts. Over the past few months I’ve read many articles and a few books that have been filled with inspiration and knowledge. I’ve also been fortunate enough to share some of the interesting articles I’ve come across occasionally on the RL Solution’s Resource Center.

Working in the healthcare industry, has exposed me to a lot of things are constantly changing. We read about it in the news, in publications, whitepapers and more. Recently, my focus has been on trends in digital health.

Patients are more proactive and want to be looked at as partners in their healthcare journey. Providers rely on technology to collect the vital information patients provide to deliver care. As healthcare changes, so does the expectation of how digital health can help provide solutions to the industry’s challenges.

The question is where can that change be made next? The following reads are just a sneak peak into the ways technology can help support quality care:

Improving Patient Care Through Technology

It’s no argument that technology can play a significant role in changing the future of healthcare. However, it’s not always easy getting the buy-in from leadership for that change. Technological changes aren’t just categorized as going “paperless” but can contribute to better reporting, effective communication efforts and enhanced patient experience. Patients are continuously advocating for the use of modern technology to make their health care experience better. Just like any change, technological advances although may streamline many processes face obstacles from various parties. Nevertheless, there is still a strong demand for it as we continue to improve the way healthcare is delivered.

Digital Technology to Engage Patients: Ensuring Access for All

Back in 2016, the American Telemedicine Association predicted that “the number of Americans receiving virtual medical care is forecast to double from 15 million in 2016 to 30 million in 2017”. We haven’t stopped there as the need for virtual care is growing. The future of healthcare will be more patient-centered and value-based care and as such healthcare should become more of a continuous experience that patients can access easily. Digital technology gives healthcare providers the opportunity bridge that gap.

Happy reading!

Anjali Arya is a Product Marketer at RL Solutions and a budding Medium blogger from Toronto, Canada. Have something interesting to share? or just curious about her work, follow her on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter and start a conversation!

Originally published at resources.rlsolutions.com.

Things I Read and Loved: The Patient Experience was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What I am about to tell you is a free, simple and easy to apply secret. One that could change the way you look at things. One that could improve your relationships; relationships with your loved ones but also the relationships on your teams, the relationships with your co-workers, your manager, your clients. What if I told you this secret could lead to change in your organisation in the most profound way? This secret will lead to the collective expansion at your workplace.

Have you ever stood before a tree and been utterly moved? Would you say that this tree is greatness? I would argue that this tree, and every tree is greatness. Maybe you look at the tree and you are reminded of God, and you are soothed and touched by your creator. Or maybe you aren’t a person of faith, and you believe in science. So the tree touches you, as you become aware of the beauty of our perfect symbiotic relationship with the tree; as it exhales you inhale; nature put us together in this most perfect way.

This tree is selfish. This tree never tried to impress you. This tree never compared itself to other trees. This tree doesn’t care what you think. This tree is pure strength and love and you feel that connection. This tree is greatness.

You know what’s even more moving than a tree? A forest. Your team is a forest. You are a collection of utter greatness.

Now, just pause for a moment, and ponder the weakest link on your team, or someone you struggle with in your organisation, someone that perhaps “doesn’t get it”, or they don’t seem to be doing a good job. Maybe they just rub you the wrong way. What kinds of words are going through your mind? Let me guess, it’s thoughts about how they aren’t good enough or their lack of greatness.

And now, take a deep breath, and turn your awareness onto that person’s Greatness. If you can’t….look harder! This person is as amazing as that tree that once moved you, you just have to turn your awareness onto it. Once you find it, hold on to it!

This is about acknowledging the Greatness that exists in your organisation. There is such a profound level of greatness there, imagine how wonderful it would be if we turned our attention onto it? By acknowledging Greatness, you cause it to grow.

We are all great, as great as that forest that gives us air and moves us all to be our best selves. I believe, that since the day of your birth, you have set forth to prove your greatness to the outside world. If every single person in your organisation simply wishes for their greatness to be noticed, then notice it! If every single person who reads this, commits only a minute of their time each meeting, each day, to notice another person’s Greatness, then you increase your collective power.

Moving forward in your life, and particularly at your workplace, consider contemplating the greatness of the people around you. If you can’t find it, keep looking. That’s the secret.

Implementation of this might be challenging at first, but here is a simple idea to help you put Greatness into practice.

• Look in the mirror and go through the motions of placing a pair of glasses over your face. These glasses will help you see things differently, they will help you see the world through the lens of Greatness. Now, get a small box, like a box that a pair of earrings would come in. On the outside of the box, label it with the words “Greatness Glasses”. Put this box on your desk at work, and as you glance at the box throughout the day, it will act as a gentle reminder to look at people through the (figurative) lens of these Greatness Glasses. Wear them cautiously at first as they can cause blurry vision as you are adjusting… just try them on for 5 minutes a day until you feel more comfortable, and eventually you should be able to wear them all day.

When you widen your lens, you can change your perspective, and you will find compassion for others, and before you know it, you will see that your problems are small compared to the greatness that surrounds you.

“Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through human ways.” Dalai Lama XIV

Our community is your community — stay in touch with the ideas and passions that inspire our work by following Radical + Logic on Medium.

Greatness was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How many of you walk into a meeting and leave an hour later feeling unfulfilled?

Research shows that collaboration often leads to success, and that collective intelligence leads to far greater successes than any individual’s performance.

If success often requires collaboration, and collaboration requires meetings then why do so many of us find meetings to be a complete waste of time?

At RL, we know that time in healthcare is a valuable resource — in the spirit of starting the year off on the right foot, here are some of the strategies that our project management team uses to guarantee getting the most out of your meetings.

1. Start with a purpose

A meeting without purpose is a precarious thing. A sure sign of a promising meeting is when everyone in the room knows why they’re there and what the agenda is — before any conversation starts!

Does the meeting you’re planning not have a clear purpose? Consider whether this means that the meeting is unnecessary, or whether it’s a sign that you have more homework to do before you send out the calendar invite.

Take advantage of your meeting invitation and use the body to share the goals and objectives of your meeting (and any prep or pre-work you expect others to prepare ahead of time).

2. Take your role seriously

As a meeting organizer, your job is to clearly outline the goals and expectations for the meeting and to keep everyone on track with a well-organized agenda.

But as a meeting attendee, you have a defined role, too:

• Read the meeting agenda
• Recognize your strengths and weaknesses
• Be present and participate
• Understand that each team is different — use these varied expectations

3. Keep it focused

You can have the best meeting objective in the world, but if the right people aren’t in the room, you won’t achieve your goals. While collaboration is a cornerstone of success, it also comes at a cost — poorly thought out meetings can create aggravation, involving too many people has a financial cost, and too many meetings means your team can’t focus on the work that needs to be done.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Who really needs to be there? Keep the group focused — you can always distribute minutes or pull or loop additional people in later.
• Can this meeting be shorter? Or consider alternate formats — standing meetings or huddles can be a great way tool to keep things short and effective.

If you’re a person who’s not invited to the meeting don’t be offended! Harvard Business Review has a some great tips on how to respond when you’re left out of an important meeting.

But why do some meetings go better than others?

It’s an important question — and unfortunately there’s no easy answer. Many factors can contribute to a successful meeting. Recognizing these factors and managing around them (when possible) can reduce the changes of a meeting flop.

One tool that we find particularly useful is Tuckman’s Team and Group Development Model:

The most critical takeaway from this model is understanding that you can’t expect teams to perform exceptionally well when they first come together. Teams will naturally encounter road blocks when they first get to work — these rough patches are natural and don’t mean that your team won’t ultimately be successful. What’s key is to support your team through these initial rough stages until they reach the upswing of the “norming” stage.

Try to recognize the differences that your team members bring to the table, understanding that people approach problems differently. We all have different skills and assets — it’s the combination of these elements that make strong teams and collaborations. Establishing norms can be a great way to bring different types of thinkers and various personalities together. Think about cornerstones like:

• Setting up meeting formats
• Establishing goals, objectives and context
• Embrace your role as the facilitator — including calling out specific attendees to participate

In summary

Meetings can be one of the most powerful tools for collaboration — but only if they’re planned thoughtfully. To help you get what you want out of a meeting (and to accomplish something along the way) follow these ten steps:

1. Why are you holding a meeting?
2. What is the purpose?
3. What is the best format for the meeting?
4. Who needs to be invited?
5. What are their roles and who can help make decisions?
6. Distribute the agenda and highlight any pre-work.
7. Account for personalities and facilitate or have the session facilitated.
8. Respect people’s time. Start and end on time and keep it moving.
9. Make time to summarize and determine next steps with the meeting participants.
10. Document and distribute next steps.

10 Steps to Get What You Want Out of a Meeting was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI Summit Review: How every industry needs to prepare for changes for advancements in AI software before adoption.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the startup culture is changing the shape of business and is creating a general need to innovate across all industries. As more business are incorporating AI into their business strategies, uncertainties around future liabilities are becoming the forefront of many IP Lawyer discussions. During the AI Summit lead by Norton Rose Fulbright, we had the privilege of hearing from experts in the legal field and the tech field to assist in predicting the legal challenges of adopting AI so that businesses can manage risks effectively. For a comprehensive guide to managing ethics and risks associated with AI visit http://www.aitech.law/.

What is AI?

We all have an idea of what AI is, but few of us can comprehensively explain what AI can actually do right now and how they are using it in their daily lives. Graham Taylor from University of Guelph provided a succinct summary of AI as it is now and where it is heading in the near future. Currently, there are only 3 types of AI in use today: Visual Processing, Audio Processing, and Natural Language Processing. These programs use unstructured and high dimensional data with computation (floating point operations per second — FLOPS). As the Data capacity increase and the FLOPS increase, the complexity of the artificial brain increases proportionally. However, we are already starting to see saturation for both data and FLOPS, so the rate of growth is starting to plateau.

We are also beginning to see a shift from purely predictive models with low dimension decision making outputs to more complicated creative outputs such as computer-generated poetry, music, and chatbots. With predictive models, you can train the AI to correct its own errors, but that is not possible with creative, since you cannot compute the “right answer” when there are many. Right now, many of the AI programs are using “learning to learn” models, but the next phase is to learn from exploration by placing robots out in the real world to discover insights autonomously.

In Japan, an AI program used 20 million oncology records to diagnose a rare type of leukemia and identified life-saving treatment faster than humans could have done with genetic testing.

Ethical AI

Ethics cannot be an afterthought when incorporating AI into your business strategies. If developing an AI program, ensure diverse stakeholders such as social scientists, lawyers, and domain experts are at the table before the coding begins. In general, the ethics of AI is a balance between:

• Rights/Value
• Transparency, and
• Accountability

On the rights/values ethics of AI, you must be aware of and account for inherent biases from the data that is training the AI. For example, many of the predictive policing apps and court sentencing software uses existing crime data, which is already inherently racist. To try and mitigate these risks, ensure that stakeholders are diverse enough to offer different viewpoints in hopes of satisfying the entire population.

Transparency and accountability are closely tied together, as you can’t have one without the other. Some of the biggest concerns with propriety AI algorithms are that businesses will not share their algorithm in a “white box” capacity since it is the secret of the trade. However, if a user accepts a decision made by an AI program without considering how that decision came to be the user will be liable for the decision that was made, since they ultimately are accountable for that decision. Therefore, if a decision was made off of biased or inherently discriminatory data, the person who used the data will be at fault. That is why it is SO important for businesses incorporating AI into their strategies to be armed with as much information as possible about how the AI works. This can be extremely challenging, since it’s difficult for humans to understand how the program came up with a solution.

Review the Ethics Toolkit by Norton Rose Fulbright Here: http://www.aitech.law/publications/ethics-risk-toolkit to learn how to unmask, process, validate and refine when your business is choosing to use or develop AI.

Who really owns the IP?

Often, companies think that they own the IP around their analytics algorithms and the outputs that come out of them, but it can be much trickier than you may think. The main question to ask is whether or not the vendor owns the data being used to produce the outputs. This is THE question to ask before embarking on a massive AI project. Be extra cautious about building algorithms when you do not own the data. The business may end up paying revenue to the other company that supplied the data and all the work will result in limited or even negative ROI.

Sometimes, non-humans can own the copyright. In Amsterdam the advertising agency J Walter Thompson developed a unique software that used a facial recognition algorithm to analyze all 346 of Rembrandt’s known paintings. The program was connected to a 3D printer, which painted “the Next Rembrandt”. You may expect Rembrandt’s predecessors to own the copyright of the painting, since it was based on his work. In this case, however, AI was part of the artistic process for creating the piece so the AI itself actually owns the IP.

Key Takeaways

When deciding to use or build AI technology, always do your due diligence in identifying risks surrounding its adoption. Boards must take time to understand the AI they’re using so that they can defend themselves in potential future liabilities. Upon your review ensure to pay special attention to the rights/values of segments that may be impacted, try to provide or receive “white box” explanations of the algorithms and data used for the program, and ensure you know where the accountability lies depending on the type of software, the outputs, and how it will be used. When in doubt, consult your legal counsel for advice.

Although the laws around big data and AI are yet to be finalized around the globe, what we are debating now is similar to when we first started using the internet. We are at a particularly new and fast-paced time for AI to disrupt every market, but eventually the rate of growth will saturate and the markets will settle. AI will become a commodity, and rules and regulations will be in place to protect yourself and your assets. Humans must be at the center of the program design, as well as the usage of its features.

Legal and Ethical Considerations of AI Adoption was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Meredith Lazowski, Product Designer and Laraine Domingo, Senior Designer.

Approach Overview:

After years of designing healthcare IT solutions at RL Solutions, we have learned a lot and have continued to refine our processes when approaching problems and creating solutions. One of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned, is that these processes are much more consumable when we break them down into small pieces.

That’s how we arrived at our current 6-phase, high-level current approach for designing solutions using our versions of design thinking methodologies. Based on what we have learned in both current and past projects (both large and small), we have provided some suggestions as to what to cover for each phase and some key tips on how to approach them.

We have pulled many of our session tools from the great IDEO design kit. Check them out for some great material to bring back to your organization.

Approach Steps:

1. Discovery

Research: Take the time to research and discover as much about the topic as possible through various research methods in groups or individually.

Knowledge share: If you step away to do some self-discovery, get the group together to have a knowledge share with everyone’s findings. Knowledge share sessions can be done many ways. We have found that a way that works for us is to have an in person meeting where everyone takes a turn sharing their findings and write important findings on post-its (one finding per post-it). We have found that this helps us later group findings into themes easier.

Summarize & re-identify: Take the time to gather everyone’s thoughts and summarize your findings in a format that you can continue to reference throughout the project. Based on these summaries, create either one or various ‘How might we…’ statements to define what it is you are hoping to solve in the ideation stage.

Tips & tricks:

• Be a sponge: Take the time to be a sponge and learn everything you can about the subject/ problem you are working on.
• Be open-minded: Don’t come into this phase with a full idea or solution.
• Parking lots: If someone involved in this phase is already starting to form ideas, try to keep them on track with discovery but don’t discourage ideas. Have a ‘parking lot’ area for ideas or items that come up through discovery that are important to remember for later phases. This help acknowledge that they are important ideas, yet not needed for the current phase of the project. We typically have a piece of chart paper or a area with post-its with ideas on them.
• Include multi-perspectives: Depending on the problem you are solving, it is very helpful to have representatives who can bring different perspectives into the mix.

2 . Ideation

Identify your audience(s): Using all of the discovery research and ‘How might we…’ statements, take the time to narrow down who you are solutioning for. This will help ideas have more of a focus and keep ideas human centered.

Collective idea generation: As a group and utilizing your ‘How might we…’ statements, run exercises like the Power of 10 Option (you can do in 8 , 6 or 4 even) to help spark quick ideas for solutions. Once you have many ideas on the table, start to eliminate, combine & refine certain concepts.

Tips & tricks:

• Let everyones voice be heard: It does not matter if you are the designer, boss or co-op, everyones ideas in this phase should be heard and seen as important to get the ideas off the ground. Once everyones ideas have been heard, that is when certain roles can continue to expand and ideate on those concepts.
• Bring in the typically ‘non-creative type’: They may feel like they will not be able to contribute in sessions like these, but you would be surprised to see the ideas they can help contribute. Just keep the sessions very simple and short.

3. Prototype

Rapid prototyping: Using these ideas, further conceptualize them into either low-fi or high-fi prototypes to quickly test concepts and ideas. Use this time to help define areas of assumptions that you may need validation on to better create your prototype concepts.

Testing: This step can be done at various phases of your project. Take the time to get feedback from not only your team, but the actual users and anyone else who can provide insights & validation. There are may different ways to approach testing, use what works best for what you are trying achieve and the type of project output.

Iterate: Based on feedback & research from the prototypes, continue to review, iterate the concepts to conceptualize into a more refined version(s).

Tips & Tricks:

• Know your audience: By knowing who you are presenting and getting feedback from, you can determine how hi-fi or low-fi you need your prototype to be to get meaningful feedback. This is always a hard decision to make, and it is not always a cookie-cutter decision.
• Rinse & Repeat: This phase may continue as you approach other phases.

4. Build

Identify requirements: Based on the concept, identity (and document) what the intended requirements needed to build and how the idea is broken down into pieces.

Plan & output: Determine what is the intended MVP(if needed) and work with the needed resources to create the solution (varies based on what the actual solution is).

Iterate: There are always things that are going to come up in the build stage, make sure to account for adjustment and changes as they come up.

Tips & Tricks:

• Keep requirements updated: As a concept is getting built and requirements continue to adjust, make an effort to document or adjust the initial requirements to keep up to date for refrence.
• Dream big, but be realistic: It is great to think about all the possibilities for your solution and how it could evolve and grow. This is actually a good thing so you don’t pigeonhole your idea for future, but make sure to create a focus and start with what is realistic and what makes sense as a start.

5. Implement

Rollout plan: At this phase, we tend to ask many questions such as; Who do we start with first? How do we roll it out to the rest? What do we start with? How do we promote it? Where does it live? What resources or materials are needed to support it? Basically, we are trying to determine how all the puzzle pieces work together to make a great solution. Some of these questions we will usually approach at earlier phases as well if we know they will take time or help define a focus.

Tips & Tricks:

• Keep everyone aligned & updated: Depending on the scope of the project and the output, make sure to get the necessary departments or groups involved to fill in the blanks for what is needed to release, promote, support and adjust successfully.

6. Analyze

Identify KPI’s: Know what you want to measure, why and how.

Identify tools to use to help analyze: Know what tools or methods are going to help facilitate this understanding.

Continue a maintenance plan: based on analyzing findings, determine plan to help enable the ability to make adjustments and changes overtime or for the next time

Tips & Tricks:

• Don’t let this fall by the wayside: Launching any solution does not guarantee in its success, you have to adapt and move with the people you are building it for to continue to make it successful.
• Don’t just have one method or tool for analyzing: Have multiple modes of ways to analyze and understand the feedback coming in. Data can help drive some decisions, but also understanding from conversation directly, heat-maps and other modes.

Conclusion:

This is our approach of how we typically will design digital solutions, but this is also utilized for other outputs too, such as events, booth experiences at conferences, print material, marketing campaigns & emails and even workflow adjustments and changes. Its meant to be an approach that can be applied to both large and small projects for various needs and reasons. Sometimes there are steps of the phases we don’t need for certain projects and sometimes there are some we add.

Take our suggestions for things we have learned on our approach, and we hope you can utilizes them or think twice when you start or are in the midst of a project.

Thanks for reading!

Designing Solutions: Our 6 Steps to Get You There was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To harness goodness, it’s important to have good people on your team, people with integrity, compassion and convictions.

This is a story about a guy called Peter who is working hard on building a thing. It’s a big job, but he knows what he’s doing and his instructions are clear, he’s got all the right materials, he’s double checked the plan, and he feels good about it — he feels like he is going to be able to meet the timelines. He’s even considered that there may be changes along the way and factored extra time in.

After a few weeks into the build, Jane comes along, picks up the instruction sheet, suggests that the instructions aren’t quite right, and writes down some new instructions. They discuss it, and while this new set of instructions provides a slightly different direction, Peter reviews the new instructions carefully, he makes sure he understands, and agrees to the change.

The build takes time, and over the course of a few months, this same thing happens a couple more times. Each time the plan changes, Peter assesses the changes carefully, validating the necessity of the diversion. Peter sets back to work, he works hard, he checks his work, he talks to his colleagues about the plan, and he makes sure he’s not veering off the path. He pulls back his shoulders, takes a deep breath, focuses on the goal, makes a new commitment to the work, and starts building again. The path is clear, and he’s going to be ready.

Peter had a good feeling about the first set of instructions, and each time the plan changed, he agreed to the change. The changes didn’t change his conviction, or his commitment to completing his work. When the changes came, they didn’t make him less valuable, because Peter had been careful in his assessment of the changes.

If Peter had just accepted the changes each time, without conviction, he would have been flip flopping. This is something we see politicians doing all the time. They agree with something and then later disagree with it, then later agree with it again. The indecision can be painful, and it seems manipulative.

There is never one path, and there is never one set of instructions. We want to know that the people we hire have convictions that won’t waver, we want to somehow know that they have opinions, and that they are righteous. I don’t know if it’s possible to test for that at the beginning, because we can’t always know that people are going to be like Peter. It is possible though to test the work along the way, to validate that they are working hard, that they understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s also possible to assess goodness. That’s why we have probationary reviews and one-on-ones, not just to look at the work they’re doing, but to tap in to who they are, what they’re here for, what they want.

Good people are like candles — they burn themselves up to give others light. Good people don’t have to say they’re good, it just shows.

How Good People are the Secret to a Good Team was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To the question “Who are you?”, some people will respond with answers like, “I’m a nurse”, “I’m a mom”, “I’m British”, “I’m a woman”, “I’m a foodie”…

Not exactly an answer to the question, because these things cannot be the definition of anyone. How we view our identity often comes from our experience in life.

I’m a project manager and I’m a foster parent. Both things contribute to who I am, but neither define me. I thrive on routine and consistency, I love things to be organized, I want to be a loving mother, I like to help make things run like a well-oiled machine, I need to have a purpose, to be helpful and offer value. Being a foster parent and a project manager allows me to do some of these things that I love. Being a foster parent has also helped me in being a great project manager, and vice versa.

When a child comes into our home, there are a plethora of things to consider before we even start. In Project Management, the first phase of a project is the Initiation Phase, the beginning of a project. This is where we scope out what is involved with the project… What are the expectations? What are the goals and objectives? What needs to be done for the project to be considered a success?

Initiation Phase

There are different requirements for different children based on age, gender, health, mental health, etc. As a foster mom, in the Initiation phase, I need to know the answers to a lot of questions, like…

Who is the child? How old is the child? What is the gender of the child? Where does he/she come from? What is his/her background/history?

How long is the child expected to stay? What are the things that need to be done before he/she arrives?

What will make us successful? What are the risks and how will we mitigate potential issues?

What do I need to keep this child safe? (Will I need a crib?) What issues/struggles does he/she have that I need to be aware of?

Who else do I need to consider when getting ready for this child to come into my house?

What will the outcome of this placement be? Is this long term or short term and do they have another home to go to when they leave?

What needs does the child have? Does he/she have any behavioural or medical diagnosis?

If this were a project, questions like this would help me be able to describe the project, so that I know with confidence that I fully understand the scope, the constraints, target users, outcomes, success metrics, and client needs. For example, if the child is a 12-year-old boy, I would prepare for his arrival by considering these more specific things:

· Where will he sleep? When a child comes into care there is a rule that stipulates a boy cannot sleep in the same room as a person of the opposite gender, nor can he occupy a bedroom with a child that is under the age of 5 (constraint)

· Does the bedroom need to be painted so that it is age appropriate and comfortable to their gender expression? (scope)

· Is it appropriate for my new child-in-care to go into the bedroom of another child in the home? Do I allow them to have the door closed? Do I need to instill some boundaries? (risk)

· Will he be expected to fold and put laundry away at night? This isn’t a question I would ask if he was 3. What age should he start? (scope)

· What healthy snacks will we offer in-between meals? (client needs)

· Will he share a bathroom? When will he have his shower, so that everyone has hot water? (constraint)

· Are there things in the bathroom that need to be put away for safety, e.g. Razors? Will he have issues around eating soap? (risk)

· Are there times that the house needs to be quiet? Are there younger children in the house? (risk)

· What time is bedtime and what does that routine look like? (constraint)

· Will he be expected to participate in chores? What kind, when, how, etc.? (scope)

· Will it be safe for him to be on his own in the community? If he wants to go out, what is ok? Is there a time that is not ok? Is he allowed in the home alone? (constraints, client needs)

· Will he take swimming lessons? Who will get him there? (scope)

· Do we have sports/recreation equipment that meets his needs? (constraints, client needs)

· What kind of food will he like? (scope, client needs)

· Will he have his own electronic devices? What will the boundaries be? Playing past 11pm? (constraint)

Planning Phase

As we can see from the Initiation Phase, planning for a new child in the house involves getting the physical environment ready. The work breakdown would look something like this:

· Purchase paint and paint the bedroom — 1 day

· Purchase a bike — half day

· Research expected behavior of a 12-year-old boy — 5 hours

· Prepare the bedroom (reorganize furniture, prep bed, make sure there are age-appropriate toys/activities, etc.) — 4 hours

· Purchase a new laundry basket — 2 hours

· Plan daily routines (school day, weekend) — 1 day

· Schedule swimming lessons — 3 hours

· Make a healthy-meal plan and do a “grocery shop” — 5 hours

Note: there is no way of knowing what the child will arrive with, what clothes and/or belongings he will have, etc. I would typically wait a couple of days for the child to settle in, and then arrange to go out to the stores when he is safe and sound in bed (supervised, obviously) and purchase items that he really needs (e.g. winter boots, underwear, etc.)

Implementation Phase

Implementing the plan requires having a solid plan to complete the tasks. It can’t be done alone though. Communicating about the plan, with the child’s worker and my support worker, is critical. Their blessing on the plan is necessary, and keeps me on the right path. I’m not just a project manager, I’m also responsible for completing most of the deliverables.

The timeline is important in this phase too. With foster care, the durations are unknown (how long will the child stay?), so it’s typically not feasible to plan far ahead. But it’s important to have a deeper understanding of the impact of the child’s move into our home, so that we can help to manage his anxieties, likely attachment disorder, and possible heightened behaviours.

Monitor/Control

A goal that is achieved through planning, does not necessarily mean that the goal is maintained. Observing the child adhering to a “curfew”, doesn’t mean he will continue the trend. Monitoring the child’s behavior will help to monitor our parenting successes.

If you find yourself being involved in facilitating, solving problems, and interpreting between different groups/people — and if you are constantly working around constraints and setting time-frames to make sure everyone is happy — then maybe refining your Project Management skills is something that can help you be a better YOU.

How Being a Project Manager Makes Me a Better Me was originally published in Radical + Logic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.