Organizations are struggling to improve customer-focused quality in today's highly competitive domestic and global markets. Better design, implementation, and daily management of quality improvement strategies is essential for survival. Quality improvement principles, when thoughtfully applied and appropriately modified to meet all types of customer demands, are a sound means to respond to changing markets. However, when various quality and productivity theories and methods are applied without changing the organizational culture, it is very difficult to consistently deliver quality results. This important new book focuses on quality improvement methods for high performance in public and private services not covered in other books: applications focus on construction, education, government, insurance, public utilities, health care, and nonprofit services. Rather than detailing the technical processes to achieve inspection, planning, quality auditing, statistics, or risk assessment, this book presents step-by-step guidelines, recommendations, and action plans for changing service organizations to implement quality improvements. Sound theory and careful strategic planning are presented to assist readers in developing an understanding of how to select the essential elements of systems that best fit their customers' needs.

It is widely acknowledged that many healthcare, behavioral health, and social service organizations provide less-than-optimal services and that the challenge of improving services depends on successfully changing organizational culture and climate. However, there are almost no organizational-level strategies that have been tested with randomized controlled trials. Building Cultures and Climates for Effective Human Services addresses the need for evidence-based organizational strategies for improving human service quality and outcomes by uniquely describing the authors' own case examples, nationwide studies, and randomized controlled trials to explain how organizational culture and climate can be assessed and changed. The two authors use their decades of research and practice experience in assessing and changing human service organizations to explain how organizations can improve the services they provide using the authors' ARC model, which effectively removes service barriers and supports the implementation of evidence-based practices and other innovations. The book also blends case examples with research from nationwide studies, regional experiments, and randomized controlled trials to explain the ARC model of organizational effectiveness and how it works to improve services. It provides a balance between theory, empirical research, and actual case examples to help researchers, organizational consultants, administrators, and service providers gain a practical understanding of how culture and climate affect services and how they can be improved. Furthermore, the text describes the three ARC strategies, each composed of multiple elements, to: (1) embed key organizational principles, (2) implement core organizational component tools, and (3) apply mental models to alter shared reasoning and beliefs that affect success. No other organizational-level strategies for improving services have been so well documented and tested.

Within a historical and contemporary context, this book examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. In addition to describing the major problems facing the field, the book highlights service innovations that have been developed in recent years. The resulting picture is encouraging, especially if certain major program reforms I are implemented and agencies are able to concentrate resources in a focused manner. The volume emphasizes families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies. The book considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential services—where social work has an important role. Authors address the many fields of practice in which child and family services are provided or that involve substantial numbers of social work programs, such as services to adolescent parents, child mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies. This new edition will continue to serve as a fundamen-tal introduction for new practitioners, as well as summary of recent developments for experienced practitioners.

Executive performance mgmt. systems link individual performance to organizational goals. In Oct. 2000, the OPM amended regulations to require agencies to link senior exec. performance (SEP) with organizational goals; to appraise SEP by balancing organizational results with customer satisfaction, employee perspective, and other areas; and to use performance results as a basis for pay, awards, and other personnel decisions. Agencies were to establish these performance mgmt. systems by their 2001 SEP appraisal cycles. This report studied the BLM's, FHA's, IRS's, and VA's use of balanced expectations to manage SEP in order to identify initial approaches that may be helpful to other agencies in holding SEP accountable for results.

"This practical new Guide on the 2002 AAIDD Definition Manual tells clinicians, educators, policy makers, and program managers how to implement the various components of the AAIDD definition system in their specific job settings. The authors discuss the contemporary relevance of the supports-based AAIDD definition in the context of issues ranging from special education practices and IDEA mandates, to diagnosing individuals with a higher IQ and conducting retroactive diagnoses such as in the Atkins v. Virginia case. Policy makers and program managers will benefit from discussions on how the supports paradigm can improve quality outcomes of programs, and how the 2002 system incorporates the emerging consensus in the field to move towards a supports-based approach toward services for people with intellectual disabilities." --Back cover.