A story can speak a thousand words, and sometimes save thousands of dollars

I started this week’s readings off with a “good story” by reading “The HPT Model Applied to a Kayak Company’s Registration Process” (Martin, Hall, Blakely, Gayford, Gunter, 2009). I was engaged immediately in the problems of this organization to centralize their reservation process, digitize their information so that anyone could access it at any time, improve their reservation system so that it accurately represented the personnel, equipment, spaces, times, and locations of any given tour or lesson on any given day, and the fact that they were still relatively successful in spite of these challenges and gaps. That success is a true testament to the people working in the organization. I can imagine how they will feel when the technology and systems are working for them and with them…the relief they’ll feel the first time they have accurate information.

My first experience with the HPT model (although I didn’t know it was called that at the time) was about 2-3 years ago, at my former employment, when I was on the team for a database conversion. Our database was a home-grown, outdated database that held information, but didn’t do anything with it. We were making our own tracking spreadsheets on the side which were a manual labor of love in some cases, to make sure no international students fell through the cracks as their entire study abroad experience in the US, UK, Canada, etc. depended on our ability to organize all the information, steps, and processes from inquiry stage to arrival stage (and everything in between). Each of us worked with 15-40 different universities and programs so we had to know their processes and track each student through each process…manually.

I was so excited when we were going to get a new database that would help us with everything from tracking inquiries in the system (not our personal organizational email accounts), to letting us know what tasks were still required to complete and what the deadlines were, to helping us save time and be more efficient. We spent a large amount of time mapping out all of our processes, from AR/AP to application processes, document collection, submission dates, etc. This helped me and my team realize how much information was only in our heads, and how if we had a system, we could better keep track, inform others involved in different steps of the process and save a lot of time and energy.

“The Checklist” (Gawande, 2007) was also another great read of mesmerizing stories of life-saving techniques using checklists. Something so small and overlooked saved countless lives and dollars, as well as reduced infection rates phenomenally. Who would have thought that employing a checklist to highly trained doctors, nurses, pilots, first responders, would have such an impact on life-saving techniques, wars, and budgets? I’m a list person myself and having a list has “saved my life” (figuratively) more times than I can count. I have also seen, firsthand, that a checklist can be more effective than more training, especially when there are so many specialized and specific processes and steps to keep up with – a “simple” checklist does more than another training session. At the end of the article, Dr. Pronovost was asked what it would take to implement checklists in ICU Units in the entire US, and he said 2-3 million dollars, with most of the funds going toward the “technical work of signing up hospitals to participate state by state and coordinating a database to track the results”(Gawande, 2007), all within a 2-year period. Outrageous – it seems like such a small investment of time and money for a huge payout, but as Pronovost indicates, the US doesn’t seem to want it. On the other hand, Spain is the first to adopt medical checklists nationwide, and Pronovost is hoping that “we’re not the last” (Gawande, 2007).

References

Gawande, A. (2007, December 10). The checklist. The New Yorker, 86-95.

Martin, F., Hall, H. A. IV, Blakely, A., Gayford, M. C., & Gunter, E. (2009). The HPT model applied to a kayak company’s registration process. Performance Improvement, 48(3), 26-35.

Van Tiem, D. M., Mosely, J. L., & Dessinger, J. C. (2004). Performance technology - defined. In D. M. Van Tiem, J. L. Moseley, & J. C. Dessinger (Eds.), Fundamentals of performance technology (pp. 2-20). Washington, DC: International Society for Performance Improvement.