The prior steps have charted a course for understanding the scope of issues related to self-represented litigants in your jurisdiction and identifying possible solutions to address the issues. At this point, the working group must choose the most appropriate solutions and determine how they will be realized. The court and other stakeholders should agree on the factors and priorities for this determination, including critical needs, the potential solutions available, and the feasibility of effecting change, given available resources and existing court rules and state statutes. This step includes securing resources that may exist within the court and other community agencies to help with the solutions. The implementation plan should identify objectives, necessary steps, parties responsible for each step, and when steps will be completed or an update on progress provided.

Key, interrelated attributes that are common to successful implementation efforts, generally, are:

• Leadership. Leadership must be ongoing and distributed, stemming from change-oriented top leaders who support initial phases and provide critical momentum and from middle (line) managers who influence informal networks and help maintain balance between continuity and change. Ultimately, leadership also comes from many levels where individuals carry out the action plans that cumulatively realize the chosen solutions.
• Continuity. Leadership and procedural continuity are both vital to the success of solutions implementation. Changes in top leadership during critical phases are disruptive and can jeopardize implementation efforts. To ensure top leadership continuity throughout the implementation process, avoid over-reliance upon any single official. Procedural continuity requires that steps progress regularly, although without being rushed or forced, to minimize frustration while sustaining interest, enthusiasm, and momentum.
• A sense of urgency or need. The perception of urgency or need helps to justify the investment of resources to identify and implement solutions, while supplying emotional motivation in support of change. A sense of urgency can be enhanced by an executive mandate for change, severe budget reductions, strong customer and stakeholder dissatisfaction, benchmarking results, and an overall change environment.
• Involvement of stakeholders. The court must get key stakeholders actively involved from the beginning and should provide information to and seek input from other stakeholders throughout the solution development process. Such involvement increases the likelihood that the agencies involved will correctly perceive the desired end(s), will formulate a shared concept of what conditions in the community will be if the solutions succeed, will successfully identify and prioritize key issues, and will ultimately select the appropriate solutions by which to realize the desired end state. Planning so that there are early “wins” during implementation in which the stakeholders can share helps maintain support and momentum for later and sometimes more difficult stages of implementation.
• Communication. Communicate a vision of what you are trying to achieve. When done effectively, all individuals will have a common understanding of the effort’s direction and, ideally, a sense of its relevance to them. People should hear about proposed changes often and from many channels and have the opportunity to talk about the changes in order to sort out their meanings and implications.
• Compelling vision. A compelling vision provides a unified sense of purpose to the often disparate agencies within the justice community. To be compelling, the vision must be simple enough to communicate easily. Stakeholders are more likely to share ownership in a vision if they feel they helped shape it in the first place.
• Resource allocation. The necessity of diverting resources from existing operations to support solutions implementation efforts highlights the importance of careful organizational assessments before implementation begins. Adequate resource allocation is also a matter of which resources (particularly human ones) are allocated and how. An organization that withholds these resources because they are “too expensive” or “too critical” to other operations sends mixed messages about its commitment to the process. Other issues important to human resource allocation are over-commitment of those assigned to other activities, inadequate orientation or training, poorly designed incentives, and failure to address uncertainties about whether involvement with implementation will help careers. Planning can be invaluable in resolving such resource allocation challenges.
• Empowerment. The more people who are empowered—as long as their actions are consistent with the overall vision—the better the outcome. Although no organization has the resources to remove every obstacle, successful implementation requires confrontation and elimination of the major ones by making supporting changes in organizational components, such as human resource policies, as it goes along.
• Follow-through or feedback mechanisms. Feedback mechanisms allow the court and justice agencies to monitor changing circumstances so they can learn and adapt, identify new ideas, and make modifications as necessary to align what actually happens during implementation with the preferred end state that the justice community envisions. Courts are far more likely to secure the resources necessary for ongoing phases of solutions implementation if they can provide objective feedback regarding implementation efforts.

Resources

• Booher, David E. and Innes, Judith. “A New Paradigm: Government Reform in the Information Age, ” Spectrum, Fall 2000, at 6, http://stars.csg.org/spectrum/2000/fall/fa00spectrum_all.pdf
• Bryson, John M. Strategic Planning For Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, Rev. Ed. 1995).
• Caudle, Sharon L. Reengineering for Results: Keys to Success from Government Experience (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Public Administration, 1994).
• Huy, Quy Nguyen. “In Praise of Middle Managers,” Harvard Business Review, September 2001, at 72.
• Kotter, John P. “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, ” Harvard Business Review, March-April 1995, at 59 (9 p.).
• Martin, John “Reengineering Government,” Governing, March 1993, at 26.
• Pankey, Jr., Kenneth G., Skove, Anne E., and Sheldon, Jennifer R. Charting a Course to Strategic Thought and Action: Developing Strategic Planning Capacities In State Courts (Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 2002).
• Wagenknecht-Ivey, Brenda J. , Martin, John A., Weller, Steven, and Price, David A. “Lessons for Successful Strategic Planning,” The Court Manager , Spring 1996.

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