Featured Resource: Define Program or Practice Elements
By Dr. Jonathan A. Caballero, Strategic Operations Advisor
4-min read
Well-defined programs and practices are significantly more likely to be successfully implemented. When programs lack specificity, there is an increased risk of undergoing major challenges, even when people genuinely want to advance the work.
After all, when individuals who will implement a practice or change something in the way they work lack guidance on what it looks like to do it well and on the expected outcomes of the program or practice, achieving success is harder, as even the definition of what success looks like might be a blurry concept.
One way to increase the clarity of your initiative is to develop a practice profile. This month’s featured resource, Define Program or Practice Elements, developed by the Collaborative for Implementation Practice, focuses on this topic.
Best practices and methodological considerations
To help you get started, the website offers the document “Best Practices and Tools to Define Program and Practice Elements.” Produced by the Collaborative for Implementation Practice and the National Implementation Research Network, it provides a streamlined introduction to the workflow that you can use to develop a well-defined practice profile for your initiative, including collaborative methodologies to develop it, guidance on the expected timelines you can expect when engaging in this work, and a variety of tools that can help you throughout the process.
People who would like a more technical introduction and a good understanding of the research background underlying those methodologies can have a deeper dive into these subjects through the white paper “Practice Profiles - A Process for Capturing Evidence and Operationalizing Innovations.”
Hands-on resources
After having a good understanding of the ways in which you can define a practice profile for your initiative, you may wonder what is out there to help you in practice. Don’t worry; the website offers a variety of hands-on tools to support you during the process.
Deciding which resources may be the best fit for your initiative and when to use them would be best decided in collaboration with your team. Here, we will mention just a few of them to give you a peek at the types of resources you can expect to find when exploring the website.
Practice Profile Partnership Agreement – A handy 1-pager that can help you clarify roles and responsibilities when supporting the development of a practice profile, you could use it early on in the process to start it with clarity and direction.
Practice Profile Interview Protocol Template and Example – In the second step of the proposed methodology, you would conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals who can share insight about the principles, core components, and day-to-day activities of the program or practice. This resource describes topics and questions to include in a way that is easy to adapt and tailor to the initiative for your initiative and includes a sample interview protocol to make its use concrete and easy to understand.
Practice Profile Vetting and Consensus Building — Sample Protocol – The purpose of the vetting and consensus process is to share initial drafts of the practice profile for feedback and potential revisions. This short document includes tables, guiding questions, and process recommendations to use during this step.
Practice Profile Feedback Cycle Guidance – As you iterate in the process of building and improving the practice profile, it will be crucial to request feedback about the utility of the practice profile from people who are (or will be) using it. This document can help you design a strategy for requesting this feedback and plan how to do it and how to use the information you gather to improve the practice profile you are developing.
In summary, this month’s resource, “Define Program or Practice Elements,” can help you throughout the process of developing a practice profile and supports you with conceptual guidance, formal methodological background information, and a wide variety of resources that can help you operationalize the activities and swiftly move the plans to practice. We invite you to explore the many resources it provides and consider how they could help you make your initiative as clear and specific as possible!
This article was featured in our monthly Implementation in Action bulletin! Want to receive our next issue? Subscribe here.