topic: Portfolio, Program, & Project Management
Is Your Health Care Project Headed the Wrong Way? By Zaida S. Aronovsky & Chet Stagnaro
Just because a major project is treading new ground does not mean it is destined for failure. By knowing the warning signs of a troubled project, you can intervene more quickly and effectively. Based on our more than 45 combined years of experience rescuing faltering projects, here are five of the most common red flags – and what you can do about them.
How to Improve Your Business Intelligence By Jim Buckheit
Many health care organizations’ business intelligence teams lack the experience, bandwidth and/or big-picture strategic and analytical skills needed to adequately respond to their organizations’ heightened needs.
Project Management Basics: Have You Mastered These Six Fundamentals? By Cathy Savinsky
No matter your type of health care organization, your project management fundamentals should be defined by the terms why, what, when, who, where, and how.
Five Vital Steps for Large-Scale Health Care Project Success By Zaida S. Aronovsky
Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither are large-scale health care projects. That’s because large-scale projects typically require sequential step development and extensive input from multiple internal constituents – a process that can take months or even years, depending on your project size.
Moving Health Care Facility Locations? Eight Ways to Ensure Your Move Runs Smoothly By Joella Canales
As seen in Becker’s Hospital Review. Whether your health care organization is physically moving to take advantage of a new location or as part of an organizational need for more space or downsizing, it can be a challenging experience for staff and patients alike. Planning for the move of a health care organization requires specialized skills and experience, and significant amounts of planning time to execute properly. By selecting an appropriate manager for the project, identifying and mitigating any issues, and having...
The Value to Hospitals of IT Portfolio Management By Mark Jahn
As seen in Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review. Just as investors use portfolio management to ensure that their resources are appropriately balanced among various types of investments, so too should hospital IT leaders use IT portfolio management to direct their allocation of project resources. Given the inevitable push and pull between IT demands and resources, IT portfolio management allows health care organizations to invest in projects offering the greatest potential return. In that sense, it’s similar to how...
Successfully Shifting a Health Care Project Team to Operations
By Cathy Savinsky and Alan Stadelhofer. As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. While common for enterprise health care project teams to shift into more operational roles toward the end of their projects, unless the new operational roles and responsibilities are well-defined, team members risk getting lost in the transition and failing to provide their organizations with proper and needed levels of support. In this article, we share our recommendations for best...
Proper IT Governance Begins with These Best Practices By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Leadership, according to the late management expert Warren Bennis, is the capacity to translate vision into reality. While that’s clear in industries and organizations of all types, it’s especially so in IT leadership, which fundamentally works to make an organization’s business visions real. IT leadership begins with the fundamental principles of governance, to help direct and guide an organization. But IT governance can be a challenge for many health care organizations, which...
Nine Best Practices in Healthcare IT Project Management By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Complexity comes with IT project management in health care, given the inherent need to balance competing stakeholder interests with limited resources and time. It’s also necessary to factor in the increasing rate of technology changes and external factors, such as health care-specific regulations and the risk of increasing data intrusion threats. That’s why, foundationally, health care organizations must have sound IT project management practices in place to sensibly manage both human and...
ACOs: Implementing and Sustaining Value-Based Change By Bob Wadsworth
As seen in Health Intelligence Network. Just as “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” neither is an efficient, sustainable, and physician-focused accountable care organization (ACO). Instead, expect to embrace a stair-step approach to making the necessary changes in your care delivery and administrative practices. Competency and capability development is always multi-dimensional, so consider these five steps as a benchmark for your organization’s critical thinking on ACO development. Introduction In California, we’re now in what could be termed the “second generation”...
Agile Management Can Benefit Health Care Process Improvement Projects By Chet Stagnaro
As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. Health care organization leaders are working hard to create, update and continuously improve on their processes to align with the Triple Aim initiative (see Figure 1. Triple Aim Model). Their top priorities include providing appropriate levels of patient care and patient care quality, as well as learning about patient and health plan member populations and optimizing costs for health care delivery. Since these priorities are so focused on process efficiencies and patient...