Maggie Bishop oversees the operations of 12 district offices that handle child protective service programs for the state of New Hampshire. She and her director, Nancy Rollins, noticed that more and more children in the state foster-care system seemed to be spending more time under state care before they were adopted. To look at this issue, they decided to bring together a group of district office managers who all had attended the Leading with Vision, Value and Strategy program the previous year. The group included Margaret Leitch Copeland, John Keegan, Marci Morris and Eileen Mullen. Maggie and Nancy planned to have the group use the strategic triangle and performance measurement model to help them develop a plan to address the child permanency issue. They understood that this would be a very difficult issue; the agency was stretched to its limits because staff and financial resources continued to be cut.
The group began by focusing on three key elements: defining the public value of improving timeliness of child permanency; identifying the agency’s operational capacity issues related to creating that public value; and successfully communicating those to external stakeholders (the public and the state legislature) and internal stakeholders (the staff who would have to implement any organizational change).
Operational Capacity Issues -
Historically, staff roles were defined in a way that was not conducive to timely and solid permanency planning: Assessment workers responded to initial contacts with children and families; the family service staff worked with birth parents and developed plans leading to reunification; foster care licensing staff found, evaluated and supported foster homes; and adoption staff worked with children and adoptive families following the termination of parental rights.
The team determined that real concurrent planning and permanency work demanded a different organizational model. They needed to break down the boundaries among field staff by creating permanency workers in each office and establishing “permanency teams” staff, who can share case responsibilities from the outset rather than becoming involved sequentially.
The Authorizing Environment -
The next step was finding support. The team realized the new structure would require more resources, so they would have to build political support for this initiative at the state government level. One of the steps they took was to develop an advisory group, the Commissioner’s Adoption Advisory Group, made up of influential people, including judges, community leaders, involved agencies, staff and adoptive parents. These people reviewed the existing processes and identified barriers to reducing the time to adoption. In addition, they held public forums and meetings with influential stakeholders to discuss the importance of permanency.
The team disclosed to the public what the current times were for adoption and suggested new measurable targets. The public response was very positive to this message. The result was that the state government increased its level of appropriations and, among other items, was able to fund 39 new positions, including a permanency worker at every local office and the formation of local permanency teams.
One of the most difficult challenges Maggie and her colleagues encountered was buy-in from staff. They spent countless face-to-face hours in meetings with staff people, convincing them of the importance of the change and their role in making the change successful. To assist in the implementation of this program, the agency set up permanency committees in each district office and a state-wide permanency steering committee.
On-going Strategic Management -
The administration continues to work with staff to build organizational commitment to this goal, and they continue to communicate to the public and elected officials, sharing progress in meeting goals and improving the timeliness of adoption.
Strategic Performance Measurement -
A key factor had been developing the ability to track what they are doing to determine whether it is working or not. To that end, John Keegan has created ways to collect data that generates monthly reports on case-load status.
Maggie said that although it has not been full year since the local permanency workers and teams have been in place, and in some instances they are not still totally up and running, the agency has reviewed 97 cases. Of those, 19 were resulted in adoption. She sees this as a tremendous improvement and attributes it to the local permanency workers and teams, saying, “Having that local focus on permanency is truly making a difference, so we’re going to begin to use that information as well to help with the message in keeping the focus on this particular value.”