Projects

Innovation Program Development

I developed a multi-faceted program with three focal areas and positioned the Innovation Director to serve as an internal consultant to provide tools, training, coaching, acknowledgement, and to connect the widely-varying departments to future trends relevant to our town’s population. Key focal areas I defined were:

Improving Current Processes
Nurturing a Culture of Innovation
Preparing the Organization for the Future.

I facilitated design-thinking and process improvement training for 22 employees representing 13 departments. As of June 2023, 3 "graduates" from these trainings have gone on to lead projects of their own with me serving as their coach/mentor.
I led a 3-year effort to reimagine the key city service of leaf management involved nine city departments, 13 community partners, and over 1,000 individual residents to explore, research, brainstorm, prototype, pilot, expand the pilot, and finally develop a new program. This new program is being implemented in full in 2023 and is estimated to improve resident satisfaction with leaf management, drastically reduce the carbon footprint associated with the service, and save the city $206K-$417K/year in operating costs.
In 2022, I led the evaluation of a new system to make our public request system more efficient and transparent. This system launched in 2023.
My work often intersected with the Assistant Director for Sustainability, and for her I created a Climate Action Dashboard, researched pilots for autonomous electric street sweepers and mowers, and created proposals for behavioral science-based ideas like painting our bike lanes green to improve the perception of safety and thereby increase biking and decrease car trips.
I led data analysis and best practices research working groups as part of a collaborative project with our public safety stakeholders to develop recommendations to right-size our responses to 911 calls for service. Three of the high priority recommendations will be funded in 2024 and will forever change the landscape of our public safety response.

Human-centered Design

I lead two cohorts through the understand-generate-deliver human-centered design model where we accomplished the following:

Conducted research on current operations and designed observations, interviews, and surveys to fill the gaps in understanding.
Held creative, interactive community engagement meetings to capture resident priorities and values and generate new ideas.
Conducted two pilots: the year one pilot included 22 households reimagining our leaf management practices; the year two pilot expanded to 493 households.
The Sidewalk Team to maintain our sidewalks so that they are always navigable for everyone tested one idea with nine households and presented seven recommendations to City Council along with a schedule for their completion.

Centering the resident and their real and perceived concerns when designing a new service or redesigning an existing one is critical not only to the ultimate success of the effort, but - when coupled with strong change management practices - minimizes pushback and frustration all around. While the Leaf Management change has some very vocal detractors, the end-of-pilot survey results indicated that the redesigned service was not only do-able, it was preferable, and City staff are grateful for the change.

Sidewalk management and maintenance have received a lot of visibility in Bloomington in recent years, and the announcement of pilots to consistently hold adjacent property owners accountable and experiment with alternatives to concrete for the surface material have been met with enthusiasm.

Employee Engagement Program Development

I developed a system that leveraged the structured problem-solving practices that the IU Health hospital network used in Lean process improvement to engage employees in interpreting the results from their departments and brainstorming solutions.

I worked with the Office of Organization Effectiveness to develop both train-the-trainer and train-the-facilitator curriculums.
I then trained trainers for the entire state-wide IU Health Network, trained facilitators in the South Central Indiana region, and facilitated some sessions directly at the executive, departmental, and shift levels.

The merger that happened during this same time period was a difficult time of high change for many employees. Staff reported feeling powerless over decisions that directly impacted the majority of their waking hours. By engaging these employees in both the identification of the problems and options for solutions that were within their control, engagement scores the year after this program was implemented surprisingly increased at most hospitals across the system. This program was acknowledged by the IU Health HR Director in 2016.

Continuous Improvement

To improve the experience for patients in the Emergency Department of Bloomington Hospital, I facilitated Lean process improvement sessions with multiple teams, including:

Mapping the patient and staff experiences for a variety of processes, and identifying value-added and non-value-added steps in each one.
Consulting with patients and staff to understand barriers and their root causes.
Defining projects and experiments to address root causes.
Developing a managing for daily improvement (MDI) board to promote awareness of important metrics and stimulate active, structured problem solving.

As a result of our efforts:

Average length of stay for patients stayed at or below the target 10 of the 18 months surveyed.
Gains in patients leaving before being seen by a doctor were being realized by the 16th month of the program.
Adult patient satisfaction goal scores were in the target range by month 6 of the program and were sustained through month 18.
Pediatric patient satisfaction goal scores varied widely, but were within the target range 11 of the 18 months they were tracked.
Staff retention goals were met in 12 of the 18 months of the program.
Productivity goals were below the goal, but within the target range in all 18 months of the program.
Employee engagement / staff satisfaction scores increased by nearly a full point over the previous year and were well above the goal.

Change Management

As Director of Innovation for the City of Bloomington, I led two progressive pilots that resulted in a decision to change the way we manage leaves in our city starting in 2023. The change in service required a behavioral change on the part of the ~13,000 households who were eligible for the service. Only 493 of those 13,000 households had participated in the pilot program and were fully prepared for the change. I then developed the change management and communication plan to reach the other 12,500 households and ensure that they were aware of the change, why it was happening, the support mechanisms available to them, and where to go for questions.

From the pilot programs, I identified "influencers" who could be helpful in the promotional campaign.
I determined the readiness of the households who had not participated in the pilots and for whom the change would be very new. Of those households, the team identified the ones who might need physical assistance with the new method and connected with them directly about their needs.
I developed a 2-way engagement plan that started with "going where the people are" (Farmers' Markets, hardware stores, grocery stores) to let folks know about the imminent change, and leave them with a flyer they could reference for supportive resources and a resource if they had questions.
I identified ten different communications channels including printed materials, electronic materials, social media outlets, newsletters, email list servs, and yard signs; identified the frequency for messaging through each channel, and the topic for each week - progressing toward a level of urgency in the month before leaf collection typically begins.

Results

This is an active project being implemented as we speak! Check back for more information on results and lessons learned!

Organization Effectiveness

The Employee Handbook as a Culture Development Tool

My first organization effectiveness project was a review of the employee handbook for an eLearning company in the Bay area. The culture of the company was casual but with an emphasis on productivity and teamwork. The handbook had been created from a template, was full of legal jargon, and sounded harsh and punitive - very much at odds with the operational culture. Additionally, some of the policies put forth in the handbook were also much harsher and out of sync with how the company actually operated.

I collaborated with employees at all levels of the organization to capture the voice and values of the organization and translate them to the language and policies. The final product was reviewed by a Human Resources Specialist to ensure compliance with California laws. Handbook 2.0 became a valuable and living tool in every phase of the employee lifecycle and motivated further discussions about authentic peer recognition programs based in gratitude and company values.

New Leadership, New Team

One of the most difficult leadership transitions is being promoted to lead a group of which you were once a peer member. This was the situation for a leader with whom I worked in a hospital system. He was an experienced process improvement expert who had been part of a team of experts - many of whom had vied for the leadership position he had won. And now he was tasked with leading his colleagues. Additionally, the former leader had left due to unfortunate circumstances which negatively impacted team morale. This team didn't know who they were, and this leader was transitioning in mindset from being their peer to being their supervisor.

For this team, I developed an assessment to help them understand their current state in the dimensions of purpose and values, empowerment, relationships and communication, flexibility, optimal productivity, recognition and appreciation, and morale. From that information, we developed a team charter that identified the ideal state for each of those dimensions. We re-assessed how well the team was adhering to their agreements on a quarterly basis and saw both improvement in every dimension and continued iteration of the ideal state as they became a new team together.

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