An important aspect of any project is measuring progress to assess if the changes you have made are making a difference. This section examines some tools you may find useful and examples of how other practices have used measurement to guide their improvement work.
Primary Care Team Assessment (PCTA)
One of the key tools practices may wish to use is to repeat the Primary Care Team Assessment that was completed at the beginning of this process 6 to 12 months later. By comparing your collective team scores, you'll be able to see what areas have improved and then plan what areas you may wish to work on next.
See PCTA tool
Action Plan PDSA results
Another valuable tool to inform changes and progress is to summarise and evaluate the PDSA cycles that were completed over the intervening period. Remember, at the start of this project, you were encouraged to create a Team Action Plan, then start doing regular PDSA cycles.
Aspects of the PDSA cycles you can assess include:
- The number of PDSA cycles
- Quality of PDSAs
- How many were completed in a timely manner?
- Key learnings from the PDSAs? Were they too big, too small, or the right size to be doable and stimulating, prompting further review and flow on to the next cycle?
- How many team members actively participated in PDSAs?
- How effective would you rate each one?
Peer feedback
In any project or improvement work, it is important to gather feedback from key participants; in this case, your team members to assess what worked well, what didn't work so well and lessons or learnings for the next project.
Tools to assist with this range from a basic hard copy questionnaire handed around in a team meeting through to using an electronic survey tool such as QuestionPro or SurveyMonkey which can provide automatic results collation report generation in a range of formats (pdf, excel, powerpoint and more.)
Project retrospective
A more formal method for gathering feedback and reviewing a project is to conduct what's called a project retrospective. Through the experiences of a project, the team gains experience,
"Through the experiences of a project, the team gains experience, wisdom and perspectives that they may not have possessed at project initiation. The retrospective is an important mechanism for harvesting this newly gained wisdom and seeking to apply it to future endeavours."
- "Team members come together, each with their own perspective and insights, to understand one another's view of the project and identify improvement actions. It's not a session to create an explanation for management about a project failure - that would be a typical project post-mortem. Nor is a retrospective merely completing a questionnaire so some project manager can figure out how to run the next project - that would be a typical lesson learned activity. It's not a complaint or blaming session either." (Pinnacle Projects website)
Template examples & articles - Lucidmeetings - How to lead a successful project retrospective meeting Lucidmeetings
Learn more
For a wide range of resources related to self-management support (SMS) and implementation, visit the Self-Management Support Toolkit website.