Tagged With "Project Management"

Hello ACEs Connection Friends! We are extremely excited to announce that Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence (PFE) is looking for a Project Coordinator for our Cleveland County DSS and Partners Behavioral Health Management partnership. The position is based in Shelby, North Carolina and requires co-location at Cleveland County's DSS four days per week with one day that can be spent working from home. A few brief additional nuances about the position include: - Data management and data...

Human trafficking and child sex trafficking are topics being more widely discussed across the state of North Carolina than ever before. Human service agencies are beginning to shift their focus to better understand and address this issue. Following changes within the child welfare system’s utilization of congregate care and the implementation of the Families First Prevention Services Act, one major implication that has become known are the risk factors that heighten a child’s likelihood of...

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...

We are gaining momentum in our Pathways to Permanency Project, a Vaya Health initiative to align the work of the child welfare and behavioral health systems. Workgroup sessions are taking place monthly, stakeholders’ meetings are occurring quarterly and in between we are busy ensuring the work moves ahead so that sustainable change is possible. However, as we have navigated this project it has been overwhelmingly clear that we needed and wanted to include individuals with lived experience in...

The Pathways to Permanency project, a VAYA Health initiative to align the work of the child welfare and behavioral health systems, is continuing to make progress by engaging participants from each of the six workgroups to create sustainable change. Each workgroup has identified multiple solutions for which they are currently developing implementation plans. It has been salient to the workgroup participants that individuals with lived experience are engaged in this work and have space to...

Benchmarks has implemented 2 projects across the state over the past 12 years, Partnering for Excellence (PFE) and the Standardized Assessment Protocol (SAP). Both projects are implemented within County DSS offices with a goal of ensuring children and families in child welfare have access to trauma screening and subsequent Trauma-intensive Comprehensive Clinical Assessments (TiCCAs). Having access to TiCCAs provides an opportunity for the child and family to receive holistic recommendations...

One of the hardest things to do in project management is to define goals and objectives for your project. While it seems like a relatively simple task, clarifying goals and objectives that directly tie to the identified problems can be particularly difficult in the beginning stages of a project. This can especially be the case in health and human service-related fields where the aims of projects are often to solve complex issues that are compounded by systemic and political barriers. Due to...

Since 2021, Benchmarks has provided consultation and implementation support on the Pathways to Permanency project for Vaya Health, a journey that has seen us navigate through crucial project phases. From the initiation phase, where objectives and stakeholders were identified, to the meticulous planning, execution, and now the sustainability phase, each step has been pivotal in shaping the project's success. As we prepare to transition from implementation support to the sustainability phase,...

In project management work, implementation processes are pivotal to impacting how an organization onboards new work as well as its ability to effectively implement an overall project. Challenges and setbacks are an inevitable part of any project implementation work. Underlying issues that cause the challenges and setbacks may not be immediately apparent to project managers, however, there are tools available for them to use to address underlying causes to problems. Root Cause Analysis (RCA)...