Ensemble Ensemble
Menu
Home
  • SOLUTIONS
  • Method
    • A Systemic Approach
    • Theory of Constraints
    • Working with us
  • RESOURCES
    • Productivity Scorecard
    • Articles
    • Subscribe
    • Our book
  • Results
  • ABOUT
    • The Just Work Manifesto
    • Our Story
    • Location
Book a call
loader

Culture | Language | Operations | Organisation | Resources | Strategy

View all articles SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER to get articles and more

STAY CONNECTED AND SIGNUP TO RECEIVE INSIGHT updates

Subscribe

Systems thinking: the primacy of the whole

David Hodes, Founder

Recently, I wrote about Asset Constraint Management and the capabilities required to achieve remarkable results. None of that will amount to much if you don’t encourage a systems thinking mindset with behaviours to match. Systems thinking is at the heart of what we do, encapsulated in our mantra: ‘know the whole, focus on the constraint’. Knowing the whole and being able to focus on the constraint is not possible without a commitment to lifelong learning—another core tenet of the Ensemble Way.

[Listen to audio version, read by David Hodes]

In our consulting, we use a spaceship as a metaphor to highlight the aspects you need to consider when looking at your organisation as a complex and organic whole—a system, not a collection of parts. On the left is the head office where, amongst others, the executive sit. At the behest of the shareholders, they set the goal, define the strategy to get there and provide the governance around the planning and performance of all strategic, tactical and operational work. They are custodians of the culture, and the calibre of their managerial leadership determines the likelihood of the success or failure of the organisation.

Cape Canaveral

In our metaphor, the head office contains the usual group functions you would expect in any reasonably sized organisation. Functions such as Finance, HR, IT, Marketing, Engineering, Supply and Corporate Affairs. To the right of the head office sits ‘Cape Canaveral’ where we construct the spaceships and launch them. Each spaceship represents a big idea—perhaps a new product, a capital expansion, the development of a new operation or an acquisition. In this place, call it the shop floor, the work defined in head office is made manifest in the real world (although, in our age, the ideas may be made ‘real’ in digital form first, then in the material world). The shop floor is where we’ll find project managers, field engineers, supervisors, coordinators, tradecraft, storemen, safety officers and the like. Some spaceships may be brand new models, while others are in the shop being maintained, repaired and overhauled for their next mission.

Your value-creation engine

On the right, you see a spaceship that has launched, fired up with ‘Big Idea’ fuel. Your goal is to create additional value and wealth by applying expertise and leverage to the core domains of the spaceship—your value-creation engine. Once you have your Big Idea, our systems thinking approach calls on you to methodically examine each of the core domains, not only as individual entities but how they are interwoven one with the other:

1. STRATEGY: Strategise across every domain
How will your idea flow through the engine that powers your organisation? Each interlinked area is affected, whether or not you make intentional changes. Through strategic planning, you align your system in each field and exert positive influences to differentiate your strategy and maximise your competitive advantage.

2. CULTURE: Cultivate a winning culture
When you understand, codify and develop the shared assumptions and behaviours of your team, your people will learn to better adapt to the external world and to work together energetically towards a common goal.

3. LANGUAGE: Engage purposeful language
People are meaning-making machines, basing action on verbal, written, visual, aural and bodily cues. How you communicate plans and possibilities makes all the difference in the world.

4. ORGANISATION: Cleave to a requisite organisation
When you match accountability with authority at each level of work, your people can take empowered ownership of their roles, with inspired results for the whole team.

5. RESOURCES: Mindfully manage resources
How will you turn intention into reality, every time—on time and budget? Here we define the human, material, information and financial resources required to do the work.

6. OPERATIONS: Design systematic operations
We apply the Theory of Constraints to the way you work with your resources in and across time and place to achieve your organisational goal.

7. PEOPLE: Develop the amazing in people
When you empower your people by building their sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose, you increase the rate at which they energetically perform value-adding work.

8. PROCESS: Engineer seamless processes
What can you standardise and repeat? Who does it? When? With what aim?

9. TECHNOLOGY: Profoundly transform with technology
Understand how to leverage technology to create value across your organisation, and you reap the rewards of our revolutionary digital age.

10. INNOVATION: Bring value into the world
Your idea only becomes an innovation when it starts creating value—for you, your team and your organisation. At that point, you unleash new power to start again and sustain the virtuous cycle.

The small module that’s about to dock is the VMO (Value Management Office) put in place to instrument and control the flow of value. Head office governs the rhythms and routines, while mission control ensures every part of the system functions with the sole objective of doing what’s best for the whole. It provides the operating system with the firepower to counter any disruption and seize every opportunity.

“The firepower to counter any disruption
and seize every opportunity”

In our figurative and generic system, you can imagine the complexity involved in managing it for high-performance outcomes. What choice do you have to apprehend the complexity, let alone control it if you don’t simplify it all by breaking it up into parts? In the absence of systems thinking, people give primacy to the elements and manage them to within an inch of their lives. Each function, sub-function and operation dwells in their silo, doing what they think is best for the whole. And every measure used is predicated on the idea that if all the parts are efficient, then that’s the most effective way to manage the whole.

But, that’s not how to get the best from the system. In fact, it’s counterproductive. A characteristic of a system is that it can do what none of the parts can do on their own. You may have every component needed to make a bicycle, but if it’s not correctly put together, it ain’t going nowhere. Tyres, chains, gears, saddles and handlebars cannot do anything until you assemble them into a bicycle. And then there’s the issue of intention: what is the system’s purpose? It’s one thing to have a bike, but what about the rider? What about the destination? What about the journey?

Living and non-living systems

These questions raise a thought about a fundamental divide in types of system: non-living and living. A non-living system, like our bicycle, needs repairs when it gets a puncture, greasing of the chain to keep it running smoothly and adjustments to the saddle to fit the cyclist. It’s the same with a piece of computer code or an asset like one of our rockets. By contrast, living systems are complex and adaptive. Our rider is always sensing traffic, the condition of the road, the direction he is riding and making adjustments. He imagines the destination and what he’ll be doing once he’s there, hoping he doesn’t get a puncture or get run over by a bus.

Our value-creation engines are fabulously complex combinations of people, equipped with a diverse range of capabilities, infused with personal and professional motivations, interacting with a wide array of technologies to accomplish individual and collective outcomes.

For example, take a moment to think about an organisation you’re a part of and have a go at answering these questions:

1. How many people do you interact with on a given day? Think of yesterday and put a name to every person with whom you had a conversation?

2. What systems were these people a part of? Your organisation? A vendor? A customer? A community organisation? A friend? A call centre?

3. In each of those conversations, what were you setting out to achieve? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? How did it move you to act?

4. What capabilities did each of them bring to the challenge your conversation was trying to address? What were they thinking? What did they feel? How did they act?

5. What means did you use to hold the conversation: Telephone? Video conference? Email? Face-to-face? What systems of people, process and technology provided the services you used?

6. If you met face-to-face, how did you get there: Did you fly? Go by rail? Drive? Who engineered, sold, financed, operated and maintained the ‘planes, trains and automobiles you may have used?

7. If you had a cup of coffee and a biscuit, how did you pay for it? Did you get cash from an ATM or pay for it with your credit card? What banking systems allowed you to lay your hands on your money or settle your payment with a swipe of your mobile?

I could go on, but you get the picture. The truth is we are immersed in so many living and non-living systems in our day-to-day lives that we barely notice them. Instead, we tend to look at the challenges we face in our organisations and our lives as if we were separated from the systems of which we are not only a part but in which we are deeply enmeshed.

The ripeness of the fruit

I was recently on an assignment with a leading global agribusiness firm. We were trying to think from a systems perspective of how they could improve the return they get from a substantial investment in a palm oil estate. We figured the plantation labourer cutting down oil palm fruit, paid by the kilogram, wouldn’t be much concerned about sorting his output by ripeness. Downstream, though, once the mill has crushed the fruit and shipped it to the customer, those overripe fruits included in the tally of the harvest have a material effect on the price the customer is willing to pay.

If you don’t understand the system and the time and effort required to go from forest clearing to planting, fertilising, harvesting, crushing, storing, shipping and converting, you’ll never be able to sustainably out-compete your rivals. And, if you don’t understand the living system that is the labourer responsible for the harvest, all your knowledge of the non-living systems and processes will come to naught. Importantly, all of this occurs in the much bigger system of our good earth’s ecology.

My client is acutely aware of the stigma associated with palm oil and its historical destruction of tropical forest—the habitat of the endangered and beloved orangutan. Our systems thinking must, therefore, embrace every aspect of the value chain—from the labourer in the field to the environmentally concerned consumer in the supermarket—each wanting to make their contribution to sustainable prosperity.

Whether building spaceships to conquer the new frontier or harvesting palm fruits on a tropical plantation, a profound understanding of systems thinking is a prerequisite of delivering on the potential of Asset Constraint Management.

____________________________

» Learn how our our services can help you.

» Return to view all articles.

» SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER and never miss an article

____________________________

What’s next?

The change from standard thinking to Theory of Constraints (TOC) is both profound and exhilarating. To make it both fun and memorable, we use a business simulation we call The Right Stuff Workshop.

We’d love to run it with you. To learn more:

  • download the brochure (no email required)
  • schedule a call

    ____________________________

    Night power
    [Background photo: Space walk]

    “Know the whole, focus on the constraint.”

    ____________________________

  • Culture
  • Operations
  • People
  • Process

Understanding the Jobs Patients Need Doing

David Hodes

A patient may ask for a smaller device, a clearer display or an easier app. Those requests matter, but they leave a deeper question unanswered: what is the person trying to accomplish, and why does the current approach make it difficult?

Someone using a monitoring device may want to understand whether their condition is changing, decide when to seek help or manage daily activities with greater confidence. The device is one means of achieving that outcome.

A powerful question asks how well your organization understands the jobs patients are trying to get done. A strong answer connects patient research with clearly defined outcome statements that become the formal user needs your teams use to build the design history file. Outcome-based user needs are easier to validate, flow more easily into design requirements, and result in faster time to market.

“A feature request describes a possible answer. Understanding the patient’s job to be done sets your design team up to deliver a better solution faster.”

Define the job from the patient perspective

A useful job statement describes an activity the patient needs to accomplish in a relevant context. It should remain understandable without naming your product or preferred technology.

“Use our app every day” describes behavior your organization wants. “Provide a way to recognize when a change in my condition requires professional advice” describes the outcome a patient actually desires.

The distinction affects research. If the team starts with the app, it will ask how to improve screens and interactions. Starting with the job opens questions about information, confidence, timing and support. The best solution may involve changes beyond the app.

Define a scope the team can investigate. “Live a healthier life” expresses an aspiration but is too broad to guide detailed engineering decisions on its own. “Minimize the time it takes to find a solution to my health concern without needing to talk to a doctor or call someone” gives a team a direction, a measure, an object of control and contextual clarifier(s).

Distinguish the job from the journey

Journey mapping shows how people move through a particular care pathway. Job mapping examines what they must accomplish to achieve their purpose, including the work surrounding the interaction with your solution.

The two perspectives complement each other. A journey may show that a patient waits for follow-up. The job perspective asks what they are trying to understand or decide while waiting.

This matters because current processes can become embedded in the team’s assumptions. Patients may need a reliable way to recognize an important change; they do not necessarily need the exact sequence of activities currently provided.

Use the journey to understand context and dependencies. Use the job to examine whether a different approach could help the patient achieve the desired outcome more effectively.

Study daily life where it happens

Patient research begins with observation and empathy interviews at the Gemba, the place where the activity actually occurs.

For patients, that place includes the home and the settings in which they manage health alongside ordinary responsibilities. Ask people to demonstrate routines, explain decisions and describe recent experiences.

Observe what they do. Immerse yourself in the circumstances surrounding the activity. Engage through questions that let them explain their purpose in their own language.

A person may say that managing treatment is straightforward while observation reveals multiple reminders, improvised storage or reliance on a partner. Those arrangements can reveal effort and uncertainty that have become familiar enough to go unreported.

The aim is to understand the why your solution will win before making any decisions about what your solution will do. Customers will want your solution because of the outcomes it gives them, not because of what you made.

Recruit for differences that affect the job

Patients with the same diagnosis may struggle with different parts of an activity. Differences in confidence, experience, resources and support can change how they define success.

Recruit participants whose circumstances reflect the population you intend to serve. Include relevant variations in health literacy, technology familiarity, physical ability and access to care. Are you targeting the tech savvy millennial, a busy parent trying to run a family with four kids or a retiree living in a managed healthcare facility?

Research should also examine emotional and social needs. A patient may want reassurance about managing a task alone or worry about drawing attention to a condition. Keep these needs visible alongside functional outcomes without assuming one design choice resolves them all.

Examine the complete job

The job mapping framework divides a job into eight recurring steps. These steps prompt investigation beyond the most visible interaction.

  1. Define. Establish what the patient needs to achieve and the circumstances that matter.
  2. Locate. Establish how the patient will find the information, materials or support required, including your solution.
  3. Prepare. Uncover how the patient will arrange the environment and resources for the job to be done.
  4. Confirm. Understand how the patient will make the decision to go forward with your solution and determine whether everything is ready for the intended next action steps.
  5. Execute. What outcomes matter to the patient as they get your solution and start using it. Often this is the ONLY job step the team looks at.
  6. Monitor. How will the patient assess and know for sure your solution is progressing successfully.
  7. Modify. Rarely do things work perfectly on the first try. Identify outcomes that are important to the patient when adjustments to the approach are needed when conditions or results require it.
  8. Conclude. Complete the set of outcomes by understanding how the patient completes the activity or prepares to repeat it.

Apply these prompts to actual patient work. Some steps may recur or overlap. The map should help the team discover needs, rather than force experience into an artificial sequence.

“The most useful innovation may help a patient prepare, recognize an exception or recover confidence before it changes the device itself.”

Turn patient language into outcome statements

Interviews generate verbatims: patients’ own descriptions of experiences, difficulties and expectations. Preserve that evidence, then interpret what each statement reveals about the job.

An illustrative verbatim might be, “I keep checking because I don’t know whether the reading matters.” The desired outcome may concern recognizing a meaningful change or understanding what action is appropriate.

A structured outcome statement identifies the direction of improvement, a measure, the object being controlled and relevant context. For example: “Minimize the time required to determine whether a change in a reading requires contacting my care team.”

Ask the team if there are uncovered outcomes that can set your solution apart related to how it is purchased, installed, received, set up, learned with training support, transported, maintained, upgraded, replaced or disposed.

This formulation gives research and design a clearer target. It does not establish a clinical threshold or promise that a device can safely make the decision independently, but often the features that will make your solution “easy to use” or set you apart will come from these outcome statements.

Preserve meaning as you organize the evidence

Several comments may describe the same need. One comment may contain multiple needs. Review the evidence carefully before combining it into a set of outcomes.

Remove duplication, separate distinct outcomes and retain links to the original accounts. Use plain language that patients can understand. Avoid embedding a particular feature in the statement.

Check the interpretation with participants or other appropriate reviewers. “I want fewer notifications” might mean reducing irrelevant interruptions while preserving important information. Treating it as a demand to suppress all alerts would misrepresent the need.

The output should be a coherent set of outcomes organized by job step. Completeness and clarity matter but typically it is ideal to have at least 100 and no more than 200 outcome statements for the team.

Measure importance and satisfaction separately

Qualitative research discovers needs and explains them. Quantitative research helps determine how widely they matter and how well existing approaches satisfy them.

Ask patients to rate the importance of each outcome and their satisfaction with their current ability to achieve it. Make the reference situation clear so respondents evaluate comparable experiences.

A high scoring importance outcome with low satisfaction deserves investigation. High satisfaction may indicate that the need is already well served so the team can use what already exists and put more time in creating innovative solutions to high importance low satisfaction outcomes. Low importance can reduce its priority, although clinical safety requirements cannot be dismissed through a popularity score.

Use a research design appropriate to the intended population. The outcome statements are easy to rate on a five point Likert scale. Choose population quantitative research in alignment with your target persona groups.

Identify opportunities within patient segments

The Outcome Driven Innovation approach uses importance and satisfaction to identify underserved outcomes. Its opportunity calculation adds importance to the positive gap between importance and satisfaction.

Use compatible scales and a clearly defined calculation. Interpret the result alongside the underlying responses, research quality and the clinical context.

Examine differences between groups. An outcome that appears adequately served overall may remain difficult for patients with less support or a different level of experience.

These differences can reveal meaningful segments based on unmet needs. They help the organization avoid treating demographic similarity as evidence that patients need the same solution. Prioritization should retain enough detail to explain whose outcome the proposed improvement will change.

Connect outcomes with development decisions

A target product profile brings the priority outcomes together with business goals, available technology and other relevant requirements. It helps the team agree what success should look like before committing to a concept.

Translate patient outcomes into design inputs and measurable requirements while preserving traceability to the evidence. Define which questions remain uncertain and what research or testing will resolve them.

Evaluate concepts against the outcomes they are intended to improve. Ask whether the proposed approach reduces effort, uncertainty or difficulty for the relevant patients and results in higher satisfaction scores than the baseline solution. A favorable reaction to an attractive prototype provides limited evidence unless the team can connect it with better execution of the job.

Keep patient progress connected to system performance

A priority patient need may involve work performed by a clinician, caregiver or service provider. Investigate those dependencies before deciding that a product change will solve the problem.

The Theory of Constraints helps identify where improvement can change the performance of the wider pathway. A better patient interaction can have limited effect if access to essential support remains constrained.

A Value Management Office can coordinate the initiatives needed to address these connected issues and keep investment aligned with patient outcomes.

“Patient insight becomes useful design evidence when the team can show which outcome matters, who struggles with it and how the solution improves it.”


What comes next

Use patient jobs to be done to review one priority patient job. Can your team state it clearly, map its steps and demonstrate which outcomes are highly important and poorly satisfied?

Start with observation and patient conversations. Build and validate the outcome statements, measure priorities and test concepts against them. That discipline gives Patient Centered Design a practical foundation for better products and more lives changed for good.

READ MORE

  • Culture
  • Operations
  • Process
  • Strategy

The healthcare professional: a hidden constraint in patient flow

David Hodes

A healthcare professional can recognize the value of a medical device and still struggle to incorporate it into care. The referral may be incomplete. Diagnostic evidence may arrive late. Preparation may require extra staff. Follow-up may introduce work that nobody has agreed to own. Managing the patients before and after may require additional staff which adds risk to the business side of the practice.

Those difficulties affect the clinician’s ability to help patients reach and benefit from your solution. They deserve attention during development and throughout deployment.

The purpose is to understand how professionals encounter, assess, recommend and use a solution, and what constraints they encounter in using your solution.

A useful map connects the professional’s experience with patient flow. It helps the organization identify where support, coordination or design changes can improve the delivery of care.

“Clinical enthusiasm cannot create the time, information or supporting capacity needed to deliver a therapy.”

Identify the professionals who shape the pathway

Healthcare professionals perform different jobs at different stages. A referring practitioner, diagnostic specialist, interventional physician, nurse and educator may all influence whether the same patient receives successful care.

Define which groups participate in your pathway and what each contributes. Who recognizes the need? Who establishes eligibility? Who performs the procedure? Who trains the patient? Who monitors outcomes and manages exceptions? Who manages insurance?

Include people whose work makes these actions possible. Coordinators, technicians and administrative staff may arrange appointments, prepare equipment or assemble records. Their contribution can govern whether clinical time is used effectively.

The map should make dependencies visible across roles. It should also clarify which actions fall within your organization’s influence and which require collaboration with care providers or other affected parties.

Distinguish roles from personas

A professional title tells you part of the story. Experience, setting, case volume, access to support, business acumen and familiarity with the therapy can change the work considerably.

An experienced specialist in a well-supported center may encounter different difficulties from a clinician who sees the condition infrequently or works in a rural area. A nurse coordinating a dedicated service may have options unavailable to someone balancing that responsibility with other duties.

Develop personas around these differences. Examine confidence in interpreting evidence, decision authority, available time, training needs and exposure to clinical or organizational risk.

Use research to test the distinctions. Personas should explain variations in behavior and requirements. They should help the team understand why an approach that works in one setting may fail to support another.

Map the journey from first awareness to continuing care

The professional’s journey may begin with awareness of an unmet clinical need or information about a potential solution. It continues through evaluating evidence, discussing alternatives and deciding whether the therapy belongs in their practice.

Adoption can involve local approvals, purchasing, training, changes to referral patterns and coordination with other teams. Clinical use then includes preparation, treatment, documentation, handover and follow-up.

Map these activities without assuming a single linear sequence. Professionals may return to evidence review after a difficult case or revise their approach when colleagues raise concerns.

Distinguish the journey of adopting the therapy from the recurring journey of delivering it to each patient. Both matter, but the barriers and improvement measures can differ.

Capture decisions and dependencies

At each stage, ask what the professional is trying to accomplish and what must be available before the work can proceed.

A decision may depend on diagnostic results, a complete patient history, clear eligibility criteria or advice from another specialty. A procedure may depend on staff, equipment and an appropriate location. Follow-up may depend on information that must be captured earlier.

Show the handovers between roles, including who supplies information and who receives it. Record where uncertainty is resolved and where work is repeated.

This reveals how a product can add burden beyond its immediate interaction. A useful output may still consume scarce clinical time if the professional must retrieve, interpret, reformat and document it through separate systems.

Measure the work and the waiting

The time required for a clinical activity can differ greatly from the time a patient waits to receive it. Both belong on the map.

Measure preparation, clinical work, documentation and recovery from problems where relevant. Record queues, appointment delays and time lost waiting for missing information.

Distinguish professional effort from elapsed time. Some delays consume little active attention but prevent patients progressing. Others require repeated chasing, rescheduling or explanation, drawing capacity away from care.

Define a common unit of work so comparisons remain meaningful. Cases with different complexity may require different analysis. Averages alone can hide the patients or professionals who face the greatest difficulty.

The purpose is to understand usable capacity and patient progress in the actual working environment.

Find the capacity that governs patient flow

A pathway may depend on a small amount of specialist attention surrounded by many competing demands. Headcount alone will not show how much of that attention is available.

Examine what professionals spend their time on, including avoidable administration, repeated assessments and interruptions. Determine whether the relevant constraint is clinical expertise, supporting staff, diagnostic access, equipment or a policy governing work.

The Theory of Constraints helps focus improvement on the factor limiting the whole pathway. Increasing referrals to a service already unable to process them can lengthen waiting without increasing treatment.

Investigate the apparent bottleneck before choosing a response. Better preparation or coordination may release capacity. In other cases, additional resources or changes to the operating model will be necessary.

“The measure of a design improvement is its effect on clinical work and patient progress, including the work it creates elsewhere.”

Observe clinical work at the Gemba

The Gemba is where the work actually happens. Direct observation helps teams understand how professionals use information, equipment and judgment under real conditions.

Observe preparation, interruptions, handovers and the work following the visible procedure. Ask what the professional expected to receive and what they had to obtain independently. Capture workarounds and job “cheat sheets” that are homemade to make working with your solution easier.

Workarounds deserve particular attention. A clinician may keep a private checklist because the formal process omits an important step. A coordinator may repeatedly contact another service because information arrives inconsistently.

These practices reveal requirements that interviews alone may miss. Discuss observations with the people involved so the team does not mistake an isolated event for a routine pattern. Include different settings and experience levels in the research.

Build the baseline from several sources

Gather organizational knowledge and assess technology and business perspectives before moving toward a solution. Apply that discipline to the professional journey.

Use existing clinical insight, training questions, support records and prior implementation experience to draft the map. Identify assumptions and gaps.

Assess the technologies already supporting the work. Consider compatibility with the environment, availability, maintenance, reliability and the practical resources needed for use.

Clarify the business conditions surrounding adoption. Purchasing arrangements, competing initiatives, staffing decisions and local policies may determine whether a clinically attractive solution can be implemented.

This baseline makes research more focused. It also prevents the development team from proposing changes that depend on unavailable capability or unacknowledged commitments from others.

Involve the people who can enable change

Voice of Business research asks leaders about desired outcomes, frustrations, risks and obstacles. It also identifies decision makers and influencers who should participate early.

For a healthcare professional pathway, this means understanding who can authorize changes to responsibilities, processes, resources and technology.

Ask which other initiatives could affect implementation. Identify the independent reviewers who can challenge the team’s assumptions. Agree what success will look like from the perspective of clinical work and patient outcomes.

Make the findings visible to the team members and relevant leaders. A professional may welcome a new approach while lacking the authority to secure the resources it requires. The project needs a realistic route from individual support to organizational adoption.

Use FOCUS to improve the journey

Apply the five-step FOCUS process to the evidence gathered through mapping.

Find the constraint. Identify the activity or resource currently governing the flow of suitable patients through care.

Optimize for it. Protect scarce capacity from incomplete information, unnecessary preparation, avoidable interruptions and repeat work.

Collaborate around it. Coordinate upstream and downstream roles so patients, information and resources arrive when needed.

Uplift it. Add capability or change responsibilities, processes and technology when existing capacity cannot meet the need.

Start Again. Review the pathway after improvement and identify its new limiting factor.

Automation can help when the task is understood and the proposed change supports clinical work. Evaluate its consequences, including review effort, exception handling and any burden transferred to another professional.

Turn the map into a shared improvement plan

The map should lead to a manageable set of changes with clear owners and measures. Test those changes in relevant settings and examine their effect on both professional effort and patient progress.

A Value Management Office can connect the initiatives with priorities, resources and project decisions. Clinical teams and other participants must remain involved in judging whether the changes improve work in practice.

“An effective professional journey supports a clinician through the complete job, from readiness to follow-up.”


What comes next

Use the healthcare professional journey to examine one priority pathway. Can your team explain who performs the work, where capacity is lost and what currently limits patient progress?

Build the map with the professionals involved. Establish the baseline, test an improvement at the constraint and review the result. Patient Centered Design advances when the solution and the surrounding system make beneficial care easier to deliver reliably.

“`

READ MORE

More than just work

Discover better ways to do better work.

Fresh insights, every Friday

We alternate our own actionable articles with three relevant links from other authorities.

We’ll only use your email address for this newsletter. No sales calls

    Subscribe to 'Perspectives'

    [recaptcha id:cf7note]

    More Than Just Work
    Weekly productivity insights

    Subscribe
    • EnsembleConsultingGroup
    • Share Page
    • +61 2 9387 3955
    • info@EnsembleConsultingGroup.com

    Site proudly designed by Brand Fibre

    What is to get in touch with you?



    More than just work

    Discover better ways to do better work.

    Fresh insights, every Friday

    We alternate our own actionable articles with three relevant links from other authorities.


    We’ll only use your email address for this newsletter. No sales calls

    white_arrow white_bidirection_arrow arrow-right-green arrow-right-orange arrow-right arrow-left blue_arrow blue_round_arrow tick

    Want us to get in touch with you?

     
    Thank you for your interest. We will call you back.