Case Studies

Organizational Assessment:
Working Together Can Require New Systems

The Situation

Stamey Street Consulting Group was hired to conduct an organizational assessment for a large nonprofit human services agency with more than 500 employees. We use assessments we gather your team’s perspectives and ideas to paint a clear picture of where you are and where you can grow.

Our team collected data using several different tools to write a detailed report with specific recommendations and action steps, prioritized by urgency level. Because the recommendations covered several areas of focus, it was important to include an implementation plan to assign project responsibilities and enable easier tracking.

Our team has expertise with several project planning tools, including ClickUp, Monday, Asana, and Notion. We created an implementation plan for the agency on their platform of choice, Monday. It was a platform the client was already using to manage a few smaller projects.

The Adaptive Challenge

Tracking and task assignment were the biggest challenges to implementing the recommendations from their internal assessment. Tracking progress required managing inputs across different teams in the agency. They had a research and evaluation team that managed most of the agency’s client-based data, so it was a different way of working across units for assigning, managing, and updating implementation tasks. The desired outcome for the implementation setup was for team leaders to have access to the data they needed, when they needed it.

The Solution

Achieving the desired outcome required a shift in both process and practice. Stamey Street’s work with the client included:

• Building the infrastructure within Monday to house the implementation plan.

• Selecting the data fields for the staff to use to make updates.

• Manually adding all of the recommendations from that organizational assessment into the Monday platform.

• Delivering a training on how to organize and delegate tasks by projects using the MOCHA framework.

• Conducting an orientation session on the plan’s setup and how to update it, along with decision rules for making updates.

The Results & Lessons Learned

The Stamey Street team created an implementation plan for our client on their project planning platform of choice.

Once that phase of the project was completed, behavioral changes were needed, even for what appears to be simple requests for staff to provide updates on the designated plan activities. Some teams make this change with less friction than others. In our experience, the degree of friction around adaptive challenges is directly related to how much of these behaviors are already embedded in an organization’s culture.

The leadership team that owned the plan found it difficult to use MOCHA, which made it hard to delegate ownership of its different parts.

This challenge meant that every person owned everything, which challenged them to keep the plan updated. Implementation still happened, but the process uncovered where additional work was necessary.