A brief background on organizational readiness for change
Much importance has been placed on assessing readiness for change as one of the earliest steps of implementation, but measuring it can be a complex and daunting task. Organizations and individuals struggle with how to reliably and accurately measure readiness for change. Several measures have been developed to help organizations assess readiness, but these are often underused due to the difficulty of selecting the right measure. In response to this challenge, we have developed a decision support tool that is designed to guide users interested in implementation in the selection of an appropriate readiness assessment measure for their setting.
The development process at a glance
A multi-phase approach was used to develop the Ready, Set, Change! decision support tool. The key steps of development included:
- Phase 1: Key measures for assessing organizational readiness for change were identified from a recently completed systematic review. Included measures were those developed for healthcare settings (e.g., acute care, public health, mental health) and that have been deemed valid and reliable.
- Phase 2: Study investigators and field experts were engaged in a mapping exercise to categorize individual items of included measures according to four key readiness constructs from an existing framework developed by Holt and colleagues (2010):
- Individual psychological (IP)
- Individual structural (IS)
- Organizational psychological (OP)
- Organizational structural (OS)
- Phase 3: A stakeholder panel of potential end users from different disciplines and sectors was consulted to determine the feasibility, relevance, and likelihood to recommend score of the selected measures.
- Phase 4: Findings from phases 1-3 informed the development of the decision support tool.
- Phase 5: The decision support tool underwent rigourous usability testing with potential end users to understand user interactions and experiences with the tool.
To learn more about the development process of the Ready, Set, Change! decision support tool, refer to the complete and open-access protocol paper here: http://www.implementationscience.com/content/9/1/56