Our clients face increasing pressure to innovate and improve. Insight’s leading-edge learning and improvement services help them streamline processes, meet participant needs, use evidence to increase program effectiveness, and share their successes.
We develop trainings, workshops, and learning modules with clear goals and ensure participants are engaged through hands-on activities. We draw on our team’s expertise in adult learning pedagogy and substantive expertise in many content areas when developing tailored professional learning.
We have strong experience coordinating with and convening stakeholders on a variety of topics. We work with stakeholders and communities to understand the multiple dimensions of policy issues, develop reports, and make recommendations.
We help programs provide a more meaningful and useful experience for clients through inclusive approaches to designing services.
Our continuous improvement services help programs quickly identify and implement changes that improve outcomes.
Our seasoned facilitators use adult learning practices to help coach teams to study, apply, and share quality improvement techniques.
We help programs identify process bottlenecks and streamline operations to reduce costs and improve the participant experience.
Our program specialists create meaningful measures for executive decisionmaking and outcomes-based planning.
Our staff of skilled trainers and facilitators provide a full suite of events management services tailored for diverse audiences.
Most recently, Insight’s learning and improvement experts developed a value stream map (VSM) of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) merit review process to identify challenges impeding the timely completion of reviews. VSM is a process improvement tool that helps organizational stakeholders create a shared “map” of a business process to see where inefficiencies occur and develop solutions. VSM works by drawing on the collective knowledge of the stakeholders and using a collaborative problem-solving process that uses the map as a shared starting point for analysis. We also conducted focus groups with NSF program officers and peer reviewers who had served as ad hoc and panel reviewers. We used the VSM to analyze each step in the merit review process for strengths and opportunities for improvement. This work concluded with overall recommendations for steps NSF could take to increase the efficiency of the merit review process.
For the U.S Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, Insight provided expert technical assistance to selected state agencies administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to improve their internal business processes and performance. As part of this work, Insight’s learning and improvement experts supported the formation of a SNAP learning collaborative to promote and support dynamic and interactive engagement among state and county agencies. The shared goal was to rapidly improve SNAP customer service and program access by (1) reducing the number of days to make SNAP eligibility determinations, (2) increasing application processing timeliness, and (3) decreasing churning at recertification (program exit and reentry of households within a short period of time). Learning collaborative activities were guided by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s collaborative model, a simple yet powerful tool for accelerating improvement. The teams then applied the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle to test the changes in the real work setting. Insight also provided training to federal staff in industry-standard process improvement techniques (e.g., Lean Six Sigma, Lean, business process reengineering) so they could provide coaching to states working to improve business processes and performance in application processing and case management.
Our team of learning and improvement experts provided a range of support to help 10 state SNAP agencies participating in the project improve how they developed their SNAP notices. We first helped the state agencies create value stream maps that identified all the steps in the processes each state used to create and update notices. The state teams then analyzed the steps to identify challenges that decreased efficiency in the processes, brainstormed ways to address the problems, and shared the results along with their best practices as a group to leverage the opportunity for peer-to-peer-learning. Using a PDSA approach, each team identified process improvement strategies to test when they returned to their agencies.