|
Mother, Infant and Young Child Nutrition and Malnutrition |
Information Management Systems |
 |
Setting up and managing a Comprehensive Information Management System
Sharing good Practices
- Documenting best practices focuses on what people are doing right and makes achieving excellence seem possible. Everyone involved in identifying and sharing best practices must first agree on the definition within the relevant context.
- At minimum a best practice must: 1) Demonstrate evidence of success; 2) Affect something important and, 3) Have the potential to
be replicated or adopted to other settings. Given the shifting definition of what is "best", there is an increasing preference to talk about "good practices" or "promising practices" or "lessons learned" as well as "success stories".
- Best practices can be identified and shared in five steps:
- Look for successes. This involves: listening to staff members, establishing routine procedures such as after-action review and comparing performance through routine indicators on similar tasks (internal benchmarking).
- Identify and validate best practices. This involves: observation, focus-group discussions and use of quantitative measures.
- Document best practices. This involves: identifying people with hands-on experience, describing the best practice (title, context, tools and techniques, resources, lessons learned, links to resources) and creating a central repository.
- Create a strategic plan to share best practices. This involves: listing best practices, raising awareness, sharing information, promoting discussion among potential users, providing contact details of resource people, involving key support people (e.g. opinion
leaders, change agents and early adopters) and promoting on-the-job learning.
- Adapt and apply best practices. This involves: focusing on transferring the idea behind the best practice so that it can be adapted, bringing people together in networks or working groups, comparing the setting where the practice was first developed with
the setting where the practice will be applied, developing guidelines and pointers on how to adapt a best practice to different settings, monitoring application and assessing results.
For more info, check A Tool for Sharing Internal Best Practices
02 January, 2009
|
