Case Managers' Assessment of the Value of Managing Reports in a Deviation Management System – An Exploratory Study

Deviation management systems are important formal channels for learning from experience feedback in organizations. Learning presupposes that the cases reported are successfully managed through several steps. Case managers, who typically are line managers, play an important role in ensuring learning. For this reason, it is important to organize the process of case management in a way that makes it easy and motivating for case managers to perform this task. In this paper we ask: What are the characteristics of cases that case managers find it most valuable to manage? Overall, the results suggest that cases with safety and/or security elements are seen as highly valuable by case managers. These cases are also significantly more clearly described than other types of cases. Overall, the results indicate that cases related to the core tasks of the case manager, e.g., safety and security tasks, are seen as more valuable. Other types of cases seem to receive a less systematic, more variable assessment. Based on the results obtained in this study, there is an opportunity for improved case management and learning from experience feedback by taking into consideration the core tasks of the case managers, when allocating the cases to be managed.

Keywords: Deviation management system, Organizational learning, Case managers, Value of case management, Exploratory study.

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