Previous Play

2. Collect Data

What's Next?

Tools & Tips

3. Prioritize Findings

Knowing what to change is half the battle. Making those changes is the other half. And to do that, you need to create a realistic plan for change, including ways to hold your organization accountable, categorize your strengths, and challenges into development opportunities.The first step is to use the results of your assessments to help determine your organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

Jump to: Takeaways

Who is this play for?

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Organizational Leaders

Direct-support Staff

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Young Adult Employers

Why this
matters:

Clarity drives improvement.

When “success” is explicit, teams can align strategy.

Stronger cases for funding.

Its all but impossible to deliver a service without consistent organizational support.

Highlights inequities.

Data disaggregated by demographics highlights inequities to address.

Trust grows with transparency.

Sharing back results (“You said/We did”) builds credibility.

Put it into action

Start by prioritizing your big challenges using an impact/difficulty matrix

Since you will often come up with a lot of things that need to be worked on, it’s helpful to take some steps to begin to whittle the list down. The impact/difficulty matrices process by looking each challenge or opportunity individually and answering two questions:

How big an impact does this issue have on the lives of our participants and/or staff?
How hard will it be for us to address this challenge?

Using the answers from those questions you place each challenge

Anything that falls in quadrant 1 (high impact and easier to address) should go to the top of your plan. We also think it’s important to focus on starting the work on changes that fall into quadrant 2 (high impact and harder to address). You know these things will take more time so start laying the groundwork for them.When it comes to the second row, we suggest taking time to think about what is most helpful to prioritize in quadrant 3 (low impact and easier to address). A lot of progress can often be made in this area and you don’t want to overshadow the focus on challenges that fell in the top two quadrants. As for the stuff in quadrant 4, it’s good to know what’s there for the future. And you probably shouldn’t concentrate on any of that at the start of what you are doing.This is also a really great time to ask yourself:Is there anything on here we shouldn’t be worried about (usually things in quadrant 3 and 4)?Did we miss something important?Once you decide what you are focusing on first, it’s time to start digging into details.

Easier to address

Harder to address

High Impact

Low Impact

Detail what it will take to make each organization change

Start with an item from your “high impact” row, preferably one that’s “easier to address” (Quadrant 1), and ask yourself the following questions:

How would making this change alter the way we work? This helps you think about how making this change would alter the way your organization operates. Be sure to include an example of what that change in operation would look like.
How will we know that we have made this change? This helps you start to think about how you will assess whether or not the change is happening and is sticking. Create an example that speaks to change at an organization level.
What are all the actions you could take to help make that change? Try to keep this relatively high level. Remember that there can sometimes be multiple ways of taking action and accomplishing a task, so don’t restrict yourself to one approach during brainstorming.
What are the steps and dependencies for each of the actions you came up with? Here’s where things get complex. If you are rolling out a new policy that means you may need to take the action of staff training. That means training materials need to be created, trainers need to be trained, and training sessions need to be held.
How long will each step realistically take and what resources are necessary? Again, this can be a challenge. It probably will require making some guesses. It’s ok to be wrong. Having rough estimates that you can test and change later is much better than having no estimates at all.
What will need to happen to make sure the changes last? We all know that the end of training is the start of the real work of integrating what you learned into how you work. And that we usually need refreshers and reminders as we’re building new habits. Take time to think about what needs to be in place to help everyone be successful months or a year after you start changing your organization’s culture.

Map the steps to address a specific challenge out on a timeline

As you are answering the questions above, you can start to create a draft process-flow and timeline. Process flows take all the steps you’ve identified for an action and order them by the order you’d like to do them in. We suggest doing this on a physical or virtual white board or in a way that’s easy to move things around.

Think about how you would order the sub-steps and place them in a flow from first to last. You can do multiple steps at the same time if that makes sense (ex. creating an important document at the same time you are working to hire support staff).

Once you have them ordered, arrange them on a timeline. The timeline should be as specific as it needs to be for your organization. Some organizations like to think about things week-to-week. Others work better with month-to-month planning.

Repeat the process to build out your timeline

When you are done with this, you’ll have an idea of how long you think it will take to change an aspect of your organizational culture. Now choose a different challenge area and repeat this process, starting with answering those six questions and then creating a process flow. Once you have the second flow down, add it to your timeline.

Fitting within Organizational Time Lines

Implementing evaluation findings in the midst of what’s already on the timeline can be really, REALLY, challenging. That process will create a lot of questions and concerns. Some common questions to ask during this process include:

Do we have enough resources to do multiple things at the same time?
How much change are we, as an organization, capable of at one time?
Are any of these processes dependent on other ones? If so, how does that change the order?
Are we taking any redundant steps?

Don’t be afraid to make big and small changes to what you’ve already done. That is an important part of the process.

Throughout this process make time to get feedback from your colleagues. By the time you are done you will have a roadmap for making the changes you need to within your organizations.

Decide The Priority

Now it's time to identify what MUST be done before you start working with OY or roll out your new programs or services. Chances are by this point, you’ve identified a lot of changes to make in your organization. The next step is to determine when you think you will be “good enough” to start working with Opportunity Youth. One way to do that is to think in terms of potential harms to participants and staff versus potential benefits to them.

Ask yourself: Where in your roadmap is the point where your organization's ability to consistently deliver benefits is going to surpass your realistic probability of causing harm?

Again, that’s not an easy thing to decide. You need to involve other people in those discussions and work to reach some sort of consensus. In the process your plans and roadmap might change. What we can promise you is that it’s better to struggle with that now rather than dealing with the future pain and guilt that can come from unintentionally harming someone in the future by rushing to roll out a program or service.

Takeaways:

Prioritize what matters most first. Use an impact/difficulty matrix to focus on high-impact changes—starting with those that are easier to implement while beginning groundwork for more complex priorities.
Break big changes into clear, manageable steps. Define what success looks like, identify actions, map dependencies, and estimate time and resources to turn ideas into realistic plans.
Turn plans into timelines you can execute. Organize actions into process flows and place them on a timeline, allowing for parallel work and adjustments as needed.
Build iteratively and stay flexible. Repeat the process across priorities, integrate efforts into existing workflows, and continuously refine based on capacity, dependencies, and feedback.
Balance urgency with readiness to avoid harm. Decide when you are “ready enough” to act by weighing potential benefits against risks to participants and staff—prioritizing responsible, thoughtful implementation over speed.

What's next

Final Module