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Achieving Best Results is not easy. Few people or organizations are so extraordinarily gifted that it occurs naturally and fortune offers only fitful hope. Therefore we devise good methods; we apply our smarts and elbow grease to realize outstanding results.
Since home healthcare deals with the dynamic - people and the world - a design and application of best practice methods cannot be too narrow. In cultivating foresight and making plans, they must be both comprehensive and laid out in appropriate detail. To actualize these plans you must also create policies, meaningful measurements and way-points which together act as your guides and sign-posts.
On this last point, a proven example of how this works comes from the development of Kanban systems in Japan. In several industries, outstanding quality results were achieved by using processing sign-posts. These functioned akin to scheduling systems, but in the 1950’s Toyota expanded this concept to support entire production systems, so it highlighted the problem and high performance areas on a continuous basis.
Yet good planning and well designed measurements are not enough. To be the best demands consistent delivery of right actions and not intermittent performance. For example, in personal behavior, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) in his book Nicomachean Ethics demonstrated that a truly virtuous person obtains this disposition by repeatedly performing good acts. For organizations, a similar relationship exists – repeated right acts yield high performance.
From these general considerations you see several threads- best results require not only thoughtful plans, resources and execution, but also measurements, appropriate signals and clear and timely communications- all performed consistently. The financial team is a key player in all of these aspects. As a top-notch contributor, it helps formulate and ensure that plans are prudent; they are consistently measured and that events-good and bad- are effectively communicated. |