Track Your Progress Closely Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) advocates taking an active approach toward implementation.

In terms of transportability, we tend to think about 'Are people getting the intervention techniques correct?', and so there continues to be after the initial training an emphasis on 'Are you doing the particular approach properly?' But oftentimes absent is consultation on the implementation process itself, so for instance, in a program that involves kids in foster care, there can be a lot of hang-ups as a result of the fact that people in the agency where the work is going to be done are trained but there are no foster kids that are being referred, or maybe there is a stream of foster care referrals and no foster parents. And so everybody is waiting for things to get started, but there is something that is interrupting the process.

The staff have been trained. There are no foster kids being referred. The standard approach might be, "So, we just wait. We'll talk to you each week, and if anything has happened, great. If not, too bad." Implementation consultation would mean that there is a plan for the people who are handling the referrals in the organization and people from the local agencies that would be making the referrals to get together and talk about what's going on. Or there are no foster parents available, and they've advertised, but nobody's showing up, so then there would be a question of who do you bring in from the organization to help facilitate additional recruitment. Send people out to community meetings, to religious organizations, and try to get more people participating. Figure out alternative ways to do it.

It's a fairly flexible process, but it really means wrapping around the content of the intervention and figuring out where it needs additional help to actually get off the ground rather than just sort of standing back and waiting to see if it succeeds or fails.

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