Benchmarks’ Center for Quality Integration (CQI) staff members are always learning new skills and honing current ones as they go about their daily project work. Over the years, staff have been enhancing their knowledge in child and adolescent brain development and further developing competencies in trauma-informed and resilience-focused work. These specific knowledge and skill sets are consistently applied across our project work within our child welfare and mental health systems. Though CQI staff are adept at project management, there is still more to be learned about industry best practices and managing the wide array of challenges involved in implementing new projects. These challenges can be extraordinarily difficult within cross-collaborative health and community service systems. Though these systems aim to do amazing innovative work together, there are challenges to the project work going smoothly and producing valued outcomes for the systems and those they serve. Some of these difficulties include, but are not limited to:
- cumbersome systems remaining siloed (within their own agency as well in their work with others);
- systems continuing to push down policy and legal mandates to their frontline staff with little room for staff and best practices development;
- systems expecting frontline staff and their management to participate in “extra” project work while successfully maintaining their mandated workloads;
- working within outdated systems that are not able to be shifted quickly; and
- working to ensure that the implementation process is as good as the intervention it is meant to deliver.
In order to expand our knowledge and continue to pioneer quality systemic change, CQI staff engage in regular leadership development and discussion. The most recent information we are studying is Project Management in Health and Community Services: Getting Good Ideas to Work from Judith Dwyer, Zhanming Liang, and Valerie Thiessen. This third edition uses the most recent research literature in the field, going back only ten years. It provides a helpful and practical guide for project managers who implement real-life projects. It utilizes case studies and real life field examples to illuminate all areas of project management. This is greatly beneficial for many who work in various areas of the community health field, which includes those who work in our local child welfare and mental health systems. The authors include transferable lessons learned from fields such as engineering that innovated much early project management work. Topics such as risk management and handling change are addressed as well, and we anticipate these discussions will lead to growth opportunities. As noted earlier, project management in health and community services has its own distinctive challenges, but also has its own unique rewards when good ideas or interventions are implemented well. CQI staff look forward to utilizing tools and techniques to create ever more effective practices for success in our projects!
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