Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Phase 4 underway....

Afternoon everyone,

I thought I would post another little update from the land of smARTscope. We have now officially launched all of the 31 organizations in the program, and they are all at different stages in the process.

Phase 1 org's are very close to finishing. We have completed 7 of the 8 organizations, with the final org scheduled for their final presentation meeting in the next couple of weeks. I wish all of the organizations who have completed our process the best of luck in the future; both with the SMART Growth Program and longer-term.

Phase 2 org's are in the middle of our program right now, with all completing the survey stage and Cohesion Meeting, and 4 of 8 orgs have had their final presentation meeting. The other four are scheduled for the next few weeks.

Phase 3 org's have just come to the end of the survey process, and have either completed their Cohesion Meetings or are just embarking on them. I hope the process has been interesting and I look forward to seeing their final reports before presentations happen.

Finally, Phase 4 was deployed yesterday, with just seven organizations left in the program. I am sure they will be as professional and efficient as all of the other org's, and it will be a strange feeling when their survey stage finishes and I don't have to deploy again!

All in all, I have been very impressed with how smoothly things have ran, so I want to thank all of you for making this process as successful as it has been.

One final thing; Once your organization has completed the smARTscope process (survey, Cohesion Meeting, Final Report presentation), the next stage will be the SMART Growth program, which is administered by the Chicago Community Trust and not myself. If you have any specific queries regarding what happens after smARTscope, please contact Karen Mensch (mensch@cct.org) or Suzanne Connor (sconnor@cct.org) at CCT.

That's all for now!!

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

smARTscope Program - Update

Hi all,

It has been a while since I posted a status update on the program, so I thought I would tell you all how things are going.

Phase 1 organizations have now almost completed the smARTscope program, with some reports having already been presented, and the others scheduled for the upcoming weeks. May I extend my gratitude to the survey takers and especially the lead contacts in this phase for their extremely helpful assistance.

For our phase 2 organizations, we have now reached the point where all of our cohesion meetings are scheduled, and many of them are complete. The survey taking stage was mostly problem free, and every organization completed the survey process within the deadlines, at a near 100% completion rate. The cohesion meetings have gone well (so I hear), and our consultants are busy preparing the final reports for the presentation meetings.

Our 3rd phase organizations are busy in the middle of the survey taking process, and so I hope that by next Tuesday we have a similar situation to past phases, with timely results and a similar completion rate.

Finally, if you are reading this thinking none of the above has happened for you yet, never fear; it only means your are in our 4th and final phase of the rollout, which is scheduled to start with survey taking at the end of May/start of June. I will be in touch with the lead contacts of the remaining seven organizations in the next couple of weeks to obtain survey taker lists, contracts and all that fun stuff!

So that's where we are at; thank you to everyone for their professional attitude to the process, and I look forward to finishing off phases 1,2 & 3, and starting our final phase!