Do

Take action

The team should work together to get the project underway.

Follow the steps in your project plan.

These might include:

• training staff
• writing and updating procedures
• making changes to systems
• providing information and updates to affected patients.

Communicate with everyone involved

Improvement is most likely to be successful when everyone feels informed.

Throughout the project, communicate with:

• affected patients – you might put up posters, or include information at reception, or on your website
• the project team – use agreed channels and meet regularly as planned
• other staff members – you could provide updates at the full team hui, or post information on the team noticeboard.

Review and reflect

Allocate regular time slots to review what you are doing.

Monitor progress against your project plan. It should be a living document – add more actions and adjust timeframes if you need to.

If you need to, tweak your plan as you go.

For example, if you are asking patients to fill in an online form but not getting many responses, you might decide to try handing out paper forms instead. If it's obvious something isn't working, you don't need to persevere with it – you can make adjustments straight away.

Keep a running record.

Take comprehensive notes about what happens. Include observations of things that were expected, and things that were unexpected. You don't need to analyse anything yet, but making notes now will help you to evaluate progress later on, and will be useful for your final report.

If you used our project planning template to create your plan, use the Notes and Observations column – it's easy to forget some of the details as time passes.