Technical Assistance: A Comparison Between Providers and Recipients

Background: Much has been written on what constitutes useful technical assistance (TA) from the perspective of recipients, with less on the perspectives of the TA providers or a combination of both. In order to fill this gap, one implementation center (IC) conducted a study to compare perceptions of TA between a group of IC TA providers, who worked with six state child welfare organizations to implement innovations, and child welfare organization staff. 

Methods: Exit focus groups with six partnering states’ employees from various levels of the agency (n=35) and interviews with IC TA staff (n=12) were conducted.  The focus group protocol used questions derived from the implementation capacity measure, as described in “Measuring implementation process and capacity across State and Tribal child welfare projects.” The specific questions of interest for the present study assessed how the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) drivers framework of Competency, Organization, and Leadership supports, and other project-defined key domains, contributed to capacity in the state, what other supports would have been helpful, and lessons learned. The TA provider interview guide was informed by responses gathered from the TA recipient focus groups. Interview data were analyzed through a multi-code methodology in NVivo in order to organize information and identify themes and patterns in the data.

Results: Perceptions of TA recipients and providers were similar; however, interpretations of facilitators and barriers to the TA process and aspects of useful TA varied. Specifically, there was agreement that leadership buy-in was essential, as was a cohesive group. TA providers put more emphasis on stakeholder engagement than recipients. Both parties agreed that communication was key, but differences emerged in how they viewed the role of TA providers.  Recipients wanted direction, whereas providers wanted to build recipient capacity to manage on their own.  Both parties cited external factors, as well as internal turnover of staff in both agencies, as impacting the TA provision and aspects of useful TA.  There was agreement that matching the skills of the TA providers with needs of the recipients was useful; however, providers tried to balance being adaptive and supportive with task orientation, and recipients were ambivalent about accepting help.  Both agreed that good coordination between TA and evaluation increased the use of data to drive decision making, and facilitation and modeling/coaching provided by the TA providers was crucial to the process overall.

Implications: Providers of TA should do a readiness assessment with recipients in order to understand readiness to receive and use TA. Leadership support and coordinated teams both within TA provider agencies and TA recipients impacts the usefulness of TA. Workforce issues are a major challenge for agencies. Role clarity internally and between TA recipients and TA provider agencies is important and impacts the usefulness of the TA. Finally, evaluating TA recipients’ and TA providers’ perspectives of the implementation process may be used to inform the implementation process and suggest any course corrections that could be needed to ensure  the success of a project.