Community and team member factors that influence the operations phase of local prevention teams: Prevention Science, 8 3 , Characteristics of Partnership Success: Strategic Management Journal, 15, A Guide to Organizing Community Forums. The social life of health information, Community and team member factors that influence the early phase functioning of community prevention teams: The journal of primary prevention, 28 6 , Program Evaluation and Evaluating Community Engagement.

Press enter to search. Take Action Join the movement of young people working to protect our health and lives. Our Campaigns Get involved in our campaigns and help ensure young people's health and rights. Donate now Support youth activists working for reproductive and sexual health and rights. Sign up Get text and email updates. What is Community Mobilization? Strategies Guided by Best Practice 1. Secure Strong Leadership 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 Engage strong leadership with community member support to drive the community-wide efforts.

Strong leaders can include both individuals who take on the work and the organization s that spearhead collaborative efforts.

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Lead organizations should possess a number of key characteristics including: Ensure that individuals and organizations in leadership positions have adequate support and resources. Establish a Formal Structure 3, 4, 6,9 Develop a formal structure that can effectively lead community change efforts. This structure serves six essential functions: Establish key structures and develop guiding documents to help facilitate the coordination of community-wide efforts. These may include specific committees such as steering committees and subcommittees dedicated to a certain issue or strategy , organizational charts, codified rules of operation such as bylaws , policy statements adopted by the partnership, and formal letters of agreement for those who lead, organize, and participate in the community-wide effort.

Engage Diverse Organizations, Community Leaders, and Residents 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Engage stakeholders who are most likely to support evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention efforts. Engage young people, parents, educators, health care providers, and community-based organizations. This includes religious leaders, businesses, policy makers, media personalities, and others who have significant influence in the community. Ensure Authentic Participation and Shared Decision Making 8, 11, 15, 16 Support a sense of commitment and ownership of the vision and plan for the community-wide effort by establishing clear roles and responsibilities for all group members, developing shared decision making processes, and ensuring that community members are in key decision-making roles.

The old paradigm: Organizations as machines

Ensure Authentic and Productive Roles for Young People 17, 18, 19 Engage young people in all aspects of program planning, development, implementation, and evaluation. Provide training on how to effectively develop youth-adult partnerships. Create opportunities for both youth and adults to share decision making. Be sure to carve out specific roles for both groups based in part on their age and prior experiences. Remember to consider the practical challenges of involving young people such as scheduling meetings after school and on weekends, providing transportation, and offering meals as incentives for attendance.

Develop a Shared Vision 9, 9, 20, 21, 22, 23 Create a shared understanding of the goals of the community partnership by drafting a written mission statement specific to the collaboration. Once the mission statement has been agreed upon, be sure to make all partners aware of it so that everyone is working toward the same goal. Conduct a Needs Assessment 2,13, 22, 23, Use a variety of techniques such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews with residents and key stakeholders.

Compile data on adolescent sexual behavior rates, teen birth rates, health factors, school data, and information on out-of-school or youth at high risk as well as knowledge, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. The needs assessment research will inform the direction of the mobilization effort by serving as the basis for creating a strategic plan, program activities, internal communication plans, and public education campaigns.

Be sure to clearly define the community that the partnership is designed to serve whether it is by geographic location or other population characteristics. The strategic plan should identify the social, structural, and individual changes that will lead to reductions in teen pregnancy and birth rates. Social changes include increased public will; greater community leadership capacity; increased and high quality community participation, and supportive community norms. Ensure that goals and objectives are SMART specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-framed. Implement Mutually Reinforcing Strategies 20 ,23 ,25, 26, 29 Decide on the activities that participants—whether individuals or organizations—will undertake to support the goals and objectives enumerated in the strategic plan.

Identify a range of key strategies aimed toward youth — such as implementing evidence-based sexuality education programs in schools or improving access to youth friendly family planning services — as well as key strategies that support the overall mobilization effort. For example, develop strategies that will improve stakeholder participation, develop local leadership, and improve resource mobilization. Remember to reevaluate these activities as conditions in the community change or new funding becomes available. Create a Fundraising Strategy 12 ,22 ,23 Explore a wide range of funding opportunities to ensure that the strategies and activities can continue beyond the life of the original funding cycle.

Consider diverse funding sources including foundation grants, gifts from individual donors, and in-kind donations from organizations and business in the area. Focus on local resources whenever possible. Establish Effective Channels for Internal Communication 3, 9, 14, 21, 30 Ensure a constant flow of information by adopting formal communication strategies that allow for frequent, deliberate, and productive exchanges between partners.

Educate the Community 13, 23, 31, 32 Educate and inspire the community by holding forums, engaging local media, designing public service announcements, creating billboard campaigns, drafting letters to the editor, launching web-based and social media campaigns, or holding home health parties, parent meetings, roundtables, and conferences. The goal of public education campaigns is to generate awareness, motivate action, encourage funding, and keep the community focused on the issue at hand.

Remember to tailor the messages to the community, incorporate data from the needs assessment, and chose spokespeople who resonate with the intended audience. Conduct Process and Outcome Evaluations 23, 25, 33 Decide in advance how the partnerships are going to define success and remember that there is often a long delay between when a partnership begins its activities and when there is a measurable impact on youth in the community such as a reduction in teen birth rates. Set key benchmarks and progress points along the way. Design both process and outcome evaluations and decide on the intervals at which each will be conducted.

Process evaluations will help determine, for example, how many community members have participated in each activity and whether the activity was carried out as originally planned. Outcome evaluations will assess whether the partnership resulted in expected changes in the community. Evaluate the Community Mobilization Effort Separately 4, 5, 23, 29, 34 Conduct an evaluation to help determine the impact of the mobilization effort — that is, whether the partnership was successful in building leadership, shifting norms in the community, harnessing community buy-in, and mobilizing financial resources.

References [1] Chervin, D. Model [3] Butterfoss, F.

Strategies Guided by Best Practice for Community Mobilization - Advocates for Youth

Guidance Document [4] Zakocs, R. Review [5] Lasker, R. Model [6] Foster-Fishman, P. Review [7] Florin, P. Review [8] Butterfoss, F. The company must also have a stable ecosystem in place to ensure that these teams are able to operate effectively. Like the cells in an organism, the basic building blocks of agile organizations are small fit-for-purpose performance cells. Compared with machine models, these performance cells typically have greater autonomy and accountability, are more multidisciplinary, are more quickly assembled and dissolved , and are more clearly focused on specific value-creating activities and performance outcomes.

They can be comprised of groups of individuals working on a shared task i. Identifying what type of performance cells to create is like building with Lego blocks. The various types Exhibit 3 can be combined to create multiple tailored approaches. The best way to minimize risk and succeed is to embrace uncertainty and be the quickest and most productive in trying new things.

Agile organizations work in rapid cycles of thinking and doing that are closely aligned to their process of creativity and accomplishment. This rapid-cycle way of working can affect every level. At the enterprise level, they use the rapid-cycle model to accelerate strategic thinking and execution. For example, rather than traditional annual planning, budgeting, and review, some organizations are moving to quarterly cycles, dynamic management systems like Objectives and Key Results OKRs , and rolling month budgets.

The impact of this operational model can be significant. For example, a global bank closed its project-management office and shifted its product-management organization from a traditional waterfall approach to a minimal viable product-based process. It moved from four major release cycles a year to several thousand-product changes monthly; it simultaneously increased product development, deployment, and maintenance productivity by more than 30 percent. An agile organizational culture puts people at the center, which engages and empowers everyone in the organization.

They can then create value quickly, collaboratively, and effectively. Organizations that have done this well have invested in leadership which empowers and develops its people, a strong community which supports and grows the culture, and the underlying people processes which foster the entrepreneurship and skill building needed for agility to occur.

Leadership in agile organizations serves the people in the organization, empowering and developing them. Rather than planners, directors, and controllers, they become visionaries, architects, and coaches that empower the people with the most relevant competencies so these can lead, collaborate, and deliver exceptional results. Such leaders are catalysts that motivate people to act in team-oriented ways, and to become involved in making the strategic and organizational decisions that will affect them and their work.

We call this shared and servant leadership. Agile organizations create a cohesive community with a common culture. Cultural norms are reinforced through positive peer behavior and influence in a high-trust environment , rather than through rules, processes, or hierarchy. This extends to recruitment. People processes help sustain the culture, including clear accountability paired with the autonomy and freedom to pursue opportunities, and the ongoing chance to have new experiences. Employees in agile organizations exhibit entrepreneurial drive , taking ownership of team goals, decisions, and performance.

For example, people proactively identify and pursue opportunities to develop new initiatives, knowledge, and skills in their daily work. Agile organizations attract people who are motivated by intrinsic passion for their work and who aim for excellence. In addition, talent development in an agile model is about building new capabilities through varied experiences.

Lessons in leadership and decision making for engineers

Agile organizations allow and expect role mobility , where employees move regularly both horizontally and vertically between roles and teams, based on their personal-development goals. For many organizations, such a radical rethinking of the organizational model requires a rethinking of the technologies underlying and enabling their products and processes, as well as the technology practices needed to support speed and flexibility.

Agile organizations will need to provide products and services that can meet changing customer and competitive conditions. Traditional products and services will likely need to be digitized or digitally-enabled. Operating processes will also have to continually and rapidly evolve, which will require evolving technology architecture, systems, and tools. Organizations will need to begin by leveraging new, real-time communication and work-management tools. Implementing modular-based software architecture enables teams to effectively use technologies that other units have developed.

This minimizes handovers and interdependencies that can slow down production cycles. Technology should progressively incorporate new technical innovations like containers, micro-service architectures, and cloud-based storage and services. In order to design, build, implement, and support these new technologies, agile organizations integrate a range of next-generation technology development and delivery practices into the business.


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Business and technology employees form cross-functional teams, accountable for developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining new products and processes. They use hackathons, crowd sourcing, and virtual collaboration spaces to understand customer needs and develop possible solutions quickly. Extensive use of automated testing and deployment enables lean, seamless, and continuous software releases to the market for example, every two weeks vs.

Within IT, different disciplines work closely together for example, IT development and operations teams collaborate on streamlined, handover-free DevOps practices.

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By the year , product developers were facing a challenge—products were being released so slowly that by the time they were production-ready they were already obsolete and customer needs had moved on. They proposed a new set of values, methodologies, and ways of working that then swept through the product-development and technology arenas over next 16 years.

A new emergent organization form addresses this issue. It leverages both established and novel principles of how to organize work, deploy resources, make decisions, and manage performance with the goal of helping organizations quickly adapt to rapidly changing conditions. It necessarily requires a change in the operating model and ways of working.

Often technology and digitization are pieces of the journey toward completing an agile transformation. Such transformations can be done across an entire enterprise or within just a single function, business unit or end-to-end process. They should take an industry-backed perspective to inform the agile design, looking for the latest trends around digital, technology, talent, and supply chain that are posed to make disruptive changes in the market. They should also tie organizational agility tightly to the agile delivery of projects so that organizations build the skills necessary to deliver work quickly as well as create the right organizational environment to make those teams successful.

To learn more about agile organizations, see other articles in the Agile Organization series, or to learn more about agile technology transformations or digital transformations, please see articles on McKinsey. In aggregate, these trademarks enable organizations to balance stability and dynamism and thrive in an era of unprecedented opportunity. The next question is how to get there?

In a rapidly changing commercial and social environment, some organizations are born agile, some achieve agility, and some have agility thrust upon them. McKinsey uses cookies to improve site functionality, provide you with a better browsing experience, and to enable our partners to advertise to you.

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    Search Toggle search field. Toggle search field Toggle search field. The five trademarks of agile organizations. Sidebar What is an agile organization? Sidebar McKinsey on agile transformations By the year , product developers were facing a challenge—products were being released so slowly that by the time they were production-ready they were already obsolete and customer needs had moved on.

    The business value of design Article - McKinsey Quarterly. The State of Fashion A year of awakening Report. The product management talent dilemma Article. The four fights you have to win Article - McKinsey Quarterly. Survey How to create an agile organization.