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What We Do
HSO Clients - Who We Serve

What We Do:

We at HSO promote learning and leadership in service organizations. We join with clients in their efforts to move their agencies forward to meet new challenges posed by a rapidly changing environment. Our approach assists leaders and practitioners to know what’s working at the service team, teacher and caseworker level based in part on results being achieved with the people served. Knowledge gained is used to guide next step decisions and facilitate actions. Because frontline performance and consistency of child and family-level practice are critical to success in helping organizations, HSO provides an array of strategies, tools, and experiences to clients who are working to adapt their processes and improve agency performance.

Our services help leaders and practitioners:
  • Understand and articulate meaningful performance expectations to staff
  • Operationally define performance and measure results
  • Assess changing conditions of practice
  • Track organizational capacities related to practice performance
  • Test performance at key organizational levels [child and family,, organizational unit, center, program]
  • Facilitate action learning groups and organizational change processes
  • Stimulate and support practice development
  • Improve practice conditions, performance consistency, and key results
  • Share knowledge of organizational capacity, performance, and results with funders, practice partners, stakeholders, and service consumers
In times of rapid change, we help leaders adapt their organizations to meet new realities and prove the worth of their organizations services to themselves, their sponsors, and their community.

Training, Technical Assistance and Organizational Development Services
  • Training on qualitative practice reviews and other performance assessment methods
  • Conceptual understanding and development strategies for local Systems of Care
  • Facilitation of quality review activities and development of quality councils
  • Strategic planning and critical path analysis
  • Needs assessment
  • Practice development planning, facilitation, and support capacity building
  • Performance-based assessments
  • Coordinating integrated services
  • Performance support technologies
Examples of Training and Technical Assistance Activities Provided in Human Services Agencies
  • Grand-rounds teaching and caseworker support within local service units
    • Periodic reflective practice presentations (for grand rounds teaching) on difficult cases
    • Mentoring, coaching, and technical assistance to workers with difficult cases
  • Developing the supervisor corps to function as “champions of practice” across service units operating with a shared service area or center
    • Assemble grand-rounds case content for analysis, planning, and immediate action
    • Plan and provide training, practice support, special case consultation, resource development, and improvements in daily conditions of frontline practice
  • Conducting case practice reviews at the agency and community levels within a local system of care
    • Periodic, independent, in-depth case reviews of participant status, progress patterns, system performance patterns, stakeholder perspectives, and assessments of frontline practice conditions
    • Quantitative and qualitative pattern analyses on key tracking indicators
    • Identification of system strengths and needs for action at policy, budget, and management levels
  • Planning and conducting quality improvement initiatives at the agency and community levels within a local system of care
    • Internal QA/QI actions taken for agency performance improvement
    • Quality council initiatives supporting agency efforts and linking efforts across agencies in the community system of care
    • Major organizational reform or development initiatives to consolidate, strengthen, or expand services to meet priority needs more effectively and efficiently.
  • Quality Service Review (case practice review activities)
    • The Quality Service Review (QSR) is a case-based practice review methodology that focuses on determining the immediate status and well-being of children, families and adults being served by human service agencies. This process also assesses the service system’s ability to respond to their individual and unique presenting needs. The QSR process was initially developed monitoring service system’s capacity to meet the stipulations stemming from class action litigation. The QSR process, and its related conceptual framework, was influential in the design of the currently utilized Child and Family Services Review, which is the evaluative methodology utilized by the Administration on Children, Youth and to Families to review all 50 state’s child welfare programs. The QSR has also been used for quality assurance, organizational development, and direct practice modeling, mentoring and coaching, in mental health, education, development disabilities and child welfare settings.
What We Offer:
  • Sensitivity to the local context
  • Extensive experience in managing, measuring and developing programs across the majority of human services and educational programs
  • Understanding of large-scale service system change and reform
  • Documentation of change
  • Evaluation of change processes
  • Exploration, documentation, and measure of the consequences of change