Moving to Program-Based Problem-Solving: What an Intern Needs to Know - Essay Sample

Introduction

Organizations have different levels of problem solving, and among them is the individual client care and the program level problem-solving. Individual-level care is easier to implement since it involves looking at the phenomenon and implementing the solution one thinks best fits the challenge. However, the program based approach is more rationale and requires a systematic approach to problem-solving. For an intern that is moving to the program based approach. It is essential to ensure one has a grasp of the critical steps of program design. The discussion below will, therefore, provide the steps of program design that will be helpful for an intern shifting to the rational program level problem-solving.

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Assessing the Current Practices

It is always important to consider the current situation before beginning to solve a problem. Assessing the current practices allows a profession to find out more about the challenges and gain some background information about the organizational operations (Kettner et al, 2012). It is purely a data gathering step that involves making observations, conducting interviews, and much more to understand the current situation and operations of the organization.

Identifying Problems

A proper assessment of the current situation will provide insights on several problems the organization is facing. So the identification step is concerned with pinpointing all the problems associated with a given issue. It is important to create a pool of problems that are later analyzed to determine the best approaches to solve them. Besides, it is at this point that one may involve various stakeholders such as the employees, to do a needs assessment and collect their feedback, which will help to provide more insights on various problems. Therefore the steps need the profession to do an analysis of the collected data about the current situation of the organization and involve the relevant stakeholders to come up with a detailed pool of problems the organization is facing (Kettner et al, 2012). .

Planning

The planning step is concerned with the questions who, what, when, and how. At this step, it is important to come up with a plan that determines who will be involved in solving a given problem. It is important since it creates a sense of accountability and responsibility when people are assigned specific roles to take care of. Besides, among the pool of problems identified, the program plan should establish which one is more important than the other. It is the prioritization process, and most of the time, it will start with the problems that affect critical business activities. It is also essential to give estimated timelines so that one does not solve a given problem forever. More so, finding out alternative solutions for the most prioritized challenge is important. It is always wise to try several alternatives and have divergent opinions to solve a given problem. It is also a sign of harmony and appreciation of other team members contributions.

Design

The design step works for one problem at a time. The team or person can look at one prioritized problem, analyze the suggest solutions, and choose the best solution to implement. The design step is concerned with choosing the best fit solution over several suggested solutions and coming up with a blueprint of the implementation (Kumar & Reinartz, 2018). The choice is made depending on some factors such as the cost-benefit analysis, availability of resources, and the willingness of people to embrace the solution. Later on, the team begins to work on the approach to use to implement the suggested solution, refines the plan, and revise it until they are sure it has achieved the intended objectives. It is therefore essential to seek contribution and satisfaction of each stakeholder.

Intervention

Intervention is simply the implementation stage. It is concerned with the problem-solving process that practically involves the team in solving the problem. Assuming the current situation was that sales men are not meeting their targets, the problems identified are lack of marketing tools and poor transport, at the planning step the team decides to solve the marketing tools issues first while in the design step the team decides to give the salesmen some smart phones to use for social media marketing; the intervention stage would involve training sessions, distribution and use of the smart phones in the field. It is important since it is the only evidence that the team was working on solving the problem, and the results will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a program.

Evaluation

Though is the last step, it is good to note that evaluation should be done after every step. It is concerned with ensuring that the program is in line with the organizational objectives and the program is being run as per the initial plan. Evaluation is an essential process as it helps to ensure loopholes are realized as early as possible, corrected or even some plans changed to suit the organizational needs (Rossi et al, 2018). . However, the final evaluation is done after the implementation to ensure that the entire process met the pre-determined objectives and if there is need to review any action, it is done, and the process is repeated until the most viable solution is found.

There are risks associated with missing a step or truncating a step. For example, missing the current practices assessment means one is solving a problem poorly. For example, solving the leadership crisis, while one does not understand the relationship of various departments. Besides, skipping the planning step would leave you solving an irrelevant issue while the critical business functions are in jeopardy. Such as the need for employees' entertainment allowances is not as important as the need for increasing supplies for consistent production. Finally missing the evaluation step would lead to losses, especially when the solutions have no positive business impact, and no one realizes they were not helpful. Such as adding computer resources that never improved the business performance in any way and no evaluation was done.

Conclusion

In conclusion, program design is an interactive process, and there are various approaches to work on it. However, the above six steps are the most critical aspects of the program design and every employee, not only the interns, have a high probability of coming up with effective program based problem solving if they have a clear understanding of these steps.

References

Kettner, P. M., Moroney, R. M., & Martin, L. L. (2012). Designing and managing programs: An effectiveness-based approach: An effectiveness-based approach. Sage.

Rossi, P. H., Lipsey, M. W., & Henry, G. T. (2018). Evaluation: A systematic approach. Sage publications.

Kumar, V., & Reinartz, W. (2018). Loyalty Programs: Design and Effectiveness. In Customer Relationship Management(pp. 179-205). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.