The Higher College for Rescue Professions (HFRB) of Zurich's Protection and Rescue Service would like to have more clarity about how effective its work is. As part of a workshop conducted by Intrinsic, we were able to provide the management team with impulses for this path.
The basis of any company's lasting success is quality. At least that's how it reads in classic quality management books.
Thus, on this workshop day, there was also a desire to question the quality mission statement and redesign objectives. After all, developing quality mission statements, defining quality standards and establishing a form of continuous quality review are all part of the management's responsibility. The understanding of quality management has evolved to the extent that the successful implementation of these goals is a team task involving interdisciplinary experts. The digitalization of our work activities, for example, offers almost unlimited possibilities in the area of data collection and analysis (data science), which can be used specifically for organizational development and process management.
Now, data volumes and interdisciplinary collaboration in themselves do not bring organizations and people to a common level in their activities if there is no joint definition of exactly which goals are to be achieved, analyzed or measured. If such quality goals already exist, the question can be asked critically: does the measurement of this goal help to define the success of our organization or project?
The next question, however, is: What does “success” actually mean to you?
In charitable or humanitarian projects, success is increasingly measured in terms of impact. In simple terms, impact orientation means defining objectives in such a way that we want to achieve an impact and evaluating the achievement of objectives on the basis of an impact analysis. Impact orientation means, for example, that a training course is adapted to new needs, whereby it is not enough to be satisfied with positive feedback or to establish that the participants were able to identify with the course objectives and achieved them. Rather, impact orientation means looking at what changes the course has brought about in the participants and how the new insights are implemented in everyday working life. It would also be interesting to know what effects the specific adaptations of the course had on the participants' behavior (before-and-after comparison). Analyzing impact therefore means taking a closer look and understanding the change itself. Existing digital data helps us to do this. At the same time, it is essential to supplement this with traditional data collection tools from observations, conversations or (self-)reflection.
It is an exciting development when organizations, such as the HFRB, want to consolidate impact orientation by revising their quality mission statement and redefine and analyze success.
After all, if we don't know what effect we want to achieve with our work, we can neither classify the quality of our actions nor measure our success.

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