Week 4_ Discussion & Assignment

Michelle Wrote;

There are several different reasons why an intervention fails, such as the wrong intervention being selected or trying to solve the wrong problem. It is important that when performing and intervention that every thing have been severely observed and taken into consideration. I worked with an organization that was a travel agency, and they operated off of the commission that was collected from the booking that are processed, but they also provided a discount to the members that was taken out of the commission total. The issue was that when they initially opened the department there was no budget plan done and no guidelines were given, the agents were told to use discretion, and all though the department was a huge success in booking reservations they were still failing, because they were not withholding enough commission for the organization to operate under. Where the intervention process failed is that they never had formal training, which would have been a focus group to define the exact percentage to give to customer and the amount the organization needed to cover their overhead. During the meeting process there should have been definite guidelines to lead employees and managers from the accounting department so that the employees did not need to play the guessing game. Although they had the meeting nothing changed, because the problem was not solved with the employees and managers and was not addressed by the accounting department. The business is now in danger of folding because of the poor communication practices.

William Wrote:

Although what I am going to talk about is not my workplace but the place that I volunteer my time to sit on the board of directors for a non profit agency. As a board member we oversee the agency as a whole but we also break down into small committee groups to address needs as they arise. One of the committees that I am on is the planning committee. A change that was implemented by administration, program staff, and the board was all departments would start entering all their own data. At the time the agency had two data entry personal that was entering all agency data. So the change we made was that instead of hiring another data entry person we would require all programs to enter their own data into the collection software. This ended up being a failure that could have been huge had we not pulled reports the first two quarters of the year. What we found was some programs were right on target with getting their information entered with the first quarter. The Executive Director addressed this with staff. When the second quarter reports were pulled the data did not get any better. As an agency this failed due to program staff just did not have the appropriate time to take on more data entry. The agency ended up where we should have to start off, hiring another data entry staff member. I will say with this failure it actually turned into a very positive experience over all.