Human Systems and Outcomes, Inc. (HSO) is a management consulting and performance measurement organization specializing in the provision of technical assistance, problem solving, training and organizational development services to human services and education agencies. The goal is to assist agencies to understand and improve the consistency and quality of practice and performance for their students and clients and the range of results they are achieving. Analysis and problem solving are used to assist organizations to determine how to improve the consistency and quality of performance and results. Agencies are assisted in finding the critical path of organizational change and improvement that are necessary to improve consistency of performance and results. HSO is dedicated to improving the responsiveness and effectiveness of services provided by agencies and organizations assisting children, families, and adults with special needs to achieve successful lives in their community. Our work ranges from assisting large-scale, long-term system change efforts to helping clients with one-time or short-term organizational needs.

We assist our clients learn how to make their organizations viable and more effective through a mutually beneficial partnership. Using the information gained from quality performance review, service testing, and performance feedback, we help our clients make sound, value-added, data-based decisions. Our goal is to make positive differences in the lives of the people that our clients serve, using innovative processes and tools. We are in the business of helping our clients to learn and improve so that they can perform practice in new and better ways. Our clients gain new knowledge, skills, products, and capacities.

What We Believe:

• We believe in the inherent dignity, worth, and unique identity of each person and his/her capacity to learn, develop, and change.
  
  
• We believe that the organizations we serve have the responsibility to meet unique needs of the people they serve.
  
  
• We believe that we have the capabilities required to help organizations learn and perform their responsibilities through needed changes in policies, practices, craft knowledge, capacities, and resource allocation.
  
  

Having the experiences of stimulating and supporting large-scale system changes in various states and programs, we have learned that the key elements for making service system change in education and human services include:

• Clear Expectations: working from common understandings and a vision (shared by all levels of organization) of an integrated, collaborative, system of care based on agreed-upon operating principles, practices, and results.
  
  
• Leadership: providing consistent focus, communication, problem solving, team work, reinforcement of directions and efforts within and across agencies.
  
  
• Training, Mentoring, and Coaching: building and sustaining adequate and consistent, case-level practice across all frontline units.
  
  
• Frontline Capacity: building an effective array of community-based services and finding better ways of conducting daily practice with the current workforce.
  
  
• Flexible, Dependable Funding: creating better and more timely ways of accessing what’s needed, when needed, and where needed by children and families.
  
  
• Frequent Performance Measurement with Feedback Loops: providing feedback about frontline system of care performance so that people can change from current performance levels to desired performance levels in improving practice and getting better results for children and families receiving services.

As appropriate to context, we teach and apply these lessons when working with clients endeavoring to accomplish successful and sustainable changes in their own service systems.