Increasing the Capacity of Individuals, Families and Communities

Identifying and Promoting Best Practices

Understanding Best Practices | Key Steps in Promoting and Fostering Best Practices

Identifying Best Practices

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Step Two: Describe and Document the Best Practice
Once a potential best practice has been identified and flagged for follow-up either by the intermediary organization or by FBCOs themselves, the next step is to describe and document the potential best practice. The purpose of documenting the best practice is to provide a detailed description of the practice and its success in addressing the targeted problem.

Documenting a potential best practice differs from a typical program description in that different information in needed—information that can provide a basis for validation. This detailed description is then used to facilitate the process of validating the best practice.

EpiCenter, an online searchable database of effective practices sponsored by the National Service Research Center at the Corporation for National and Community Service, has suggested describing the practice in terms of the following components:

• The problem it solves
• The context in which it has been successful
• The evidence of its success
• The outcome or impact it helped to achieve⁴

Methods for Documenting a Best Practice
For many FBCOs, the documentation process will be a new and more rigorous type of description process than they are used to doing. As a result, you will want to provide as much encouragement and assistance in the area of documentation as possible.

One of the best methodologies for documenting a potential best practice is to conduct either a programmatic or an organizational review of the practice.

The programmatic or organizational review draws predominantly on subjective data sources and is intended to:

• Identify the critical elements that are inherent to the practice.
• Capture procedural information supporting each critical element.
• Identify the tools, processes and systems that support the potential best practice.

Which type of review you'll want to use is dependent on whether the potential best practice falls into the programmatic or organizational dimension. While different individuals with varying skill sets are involved in each type of review, the process is largely the same for both. See the following helpful sample process of an organizational/programmatic review.

Organizational/Programmatic Review-Sample Process   1. Identify a review team-The review team is made of individuals from the intermediary organization and can include a limited number of peer reviewers from other FBCOs. The key to a strong review team is ensuring that the individuals on the team have the proper skill set and expertise for reviewing the practice at hand.     2. Create a standardized list of review questions-This list of questions can be sent in advance to those FBCOs who are involved in the programmatic or organizational review of a potential best practice. These questions provide an outline indicating the types of information and source documents needed to conduct the review so that the FBCO can gather the appropriate staff and resources in advance.     3. Conduct the review-The review team conducts the programmatic or organizational reviewon site at the FBCO that has initially documented the best practice. The review is a collab-orative "meeting of the minds" as the review team and FBCO staff come together to try toidentify the core elements of the potential best practice. The programmatic or organizationalreview can include an analysis of any source documents, policy and procedural manuals, etc.that the organization has on hand. However, the review team will also need to be prepared tocreate documentation where none currently exists. For example, the team may need to docu-ment the basic process flow of the potential best practice in terms of key steps. Or they mayneed to document procedural guidelines or policies that have previously only been implied orassumed. A vital part of the review process involves identifying and documenting knowledgeabout the potential best practice that has previously been so much a part of the organizationand its staff that they are not consciously aware of it. Teasing out this "embedded" knowledgeand making it explicit through documentation is a key task of the review team.     4. Analyze the review findings-This critical step in the review process focuses on identify-ing the key elements of the practice and determining which elements are proprietary andwhich are replicable.Proprietary elements are those pieces of the methodology that work only in the specificcontext of the FBCO where they originated or are methodologies that are original andnot intended for public distribution or replication. Replicable elements are those pieces ofthe methodology that have demonstrated their effectiveness in more than one context orlocation and can therefore be replicated on a wider basis. The review team will want to doc-ument both the proprietary and replicable elements, although the replicable elements willbe of most interest for use as a best practice.     5. Document the findings from the review-Following the on-site programmatic or organi-zational review, the review team can document the findings based on the information fromsource documentation and interviews with FBCO staff.     6. Meet with the FBCO to present the review findings-During this meeting, the find-ings of the review will be presented to the FBCO for discussion and feedback. Themethodology and critical elements of the potential practice will be presented and discussed.     7. Finalize the documentation and prepare for validation-After the meeting with the FBCO to present the findings and receive feedback, the review team will finalize thedocumentation of the potential best practice. At this point, the potential best practice isready to enter into the validation process.

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Understanding Best Practices | Key Steps in Promoting and Fostering Best Practices