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The Anchor Community Initiative Resource Hub is a collection of resources, tools and case studies to help you use data to end youth and young adult homelessness in your community.

How to prep for, organize and facilitate a Quality Improvement Meeting

An essential practice for teams who make decisions from data

Here's all the info you need to schedule your first Progress Check meeting and then hold it on a monthly or 6-week basis. Talk to your Coach if you'd like a thought partner on making your local meeting a success.

Purpose

The Progress Check is a high-level problem-solving session with an unwavering commitment to making your improvement projects and your team successful. Use the meeting to accomplish these purposes:

  • Provide encouragement and recognition of the Project Leads

  • Learn whether each project is on track or likely to fall short of the aim

  • Develop action plans for getting projects back on track

  • Decide whether the project should be modified in some way, scaled, or stopped

Who should attend

  • Team Lead

  • Data Lead

  • Young people with lived experience

  • Each current Project Lead

How often

Schedule a recurring monthly meeting. Make it a habit by scheduling for the same time and place each month. You may already have a scheduled meeting to which you can add this function, but we recommend that you do not include too many additional people or topics, lest you dilute focus.

Set up for success

  • Write the agenda and distribute it at least two days before the meeting.

  • Create a data review that includes high-level data such as your actively homeless numbers, as well as data measured for each improvement project. Distribute this data review along with the agenda.

  • Keep time for each agenda item, and be strict.

  • Establish a method for keeping the group on topic. Use ELMO—“enough, let’s move on!”—to signal that a topic is important but may require its own meeting/follow up.

  • Plan thoughtfully to make this meeting a success, because it should be a lynchpin of your improvement team’s decision-making.

Click here for a sample agenda!

Fun games to help you learn quality improvement with your team

Questions you should ask when you're designing a PDSA cycle