Program-Project Development and Management

Enrichment Activity

1. Describe the context of project management in the healthcare industry. How do things
like history, costs, or recent trends affect healthcare project management?

2. Why is it important to align projects to an organization’s mission and business strategy?

What are the importance of SWOT analysis for the project?

3. Briefly describe what happens in each of the five project management process groups
(initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing). On which
process should team members spend the most time? Why? Why is it helpful to follow a
project management methodology?

4. Why is communications management so important during project execution? What is

the difference between formal and informal communications? Why are nonverbal
communications so important?

5. Find an example of a real project with a real project manager in the healthcare industry.
Describe the project in terms of its scope, time, and cost goals and each of the project’s
attributes. Try to include information describing what went right and wrong on the
project and the role of the project manager and sponsor. Also describe whether you
consider the project to be a success or not and why. Include at least one reference and
proper citations.

*Kindly relate your answer with your personal experience or from your workplace if applicable.
To be submitted not later than April 30, 2022
Answers:
1. The project management in the healthcare industry context is very exclusive in every
sense. There are factors that makes healthcare project management unique such as
health care environment, nature of healthcare project and recent trend in healthcare.
All mentioned can influence project management practices to make great impact in
advancing healthcare projects to achieve one institution’s goal.

Moreover, there are the following aspects that can greatly affect the healthcare project
management such as history, costs and recent trends. For instance, in the history of
healthcare industry during the Great depression Baylor University hospital developed
health insurance scheme due to low revenue since there were very few that can afford
healthcare. Additionally, healthcare cost has been a national economic burden specially
in the US. This turned to be impactful for healthcare project management as well. In
summary, all these factors have become the reasons to which project management
became a vital process in the healthcare. The growth of project healthcare management
become necessary as these factors are crucial in the healthcare system.

2. Business strategy is the tactical way to implement business plans. It is wise to align any
institution’s project to its institutional mission with business strategy because of
incredible amount of reasons. Firstly, resource limitations and other constraints will
make a healthcare institution rely on business plan to conserve on the costs issues.
Certain mission of the organization must be also attainable. In my previous organization
(Mukhtar A. Sheikh Hospital), it focused on aligning both the hospital mission and
business strategy since Pakistan and the remote location of this institution is one of the
limitation from boosting its monetary revenue of the hospital. If that facility did not
align the business strategy and the hospital mission together, it will easily loose
business.

SWOT analysis is a very efficient tool in project management specially in planning. It aids
in strategic planning in which it helps identify tactical initiatives. With this tool it will
help safeguard those project concepts that are linked with the institution’s strategic
plan.

3. In project management there are five processes groups namely, initiating process,
planning process, executing process, monitoring and controlling and lastly closing
process. Each of them are very crucial to perform since all five are very important parts.
To begin with, initiating process is the first phase that deals with actions to define and to
authorize new projects and project phases. Secondly, planning process comprises of
 formulating and maintain a workable outline ensuring project scope, schedule and cost
goals will be met. Third is the executing processes, which is the most crucial phase that
includes coordination of the people and other resources to carry out the project plans
and produce deliverables of the project or phase. Next to that, there is monitoring and
controlling process which is the fourth phase. Monitoring and controlling deals with
measuring the progress toward achieving project goals, monitoring deviation from plans
and taking corrective or preventive action to match the progress with plans and overall
expectations. Lastly, closing process is the final step and it simply includes the
formalizing the completion and the acceptance of the project and bringing to orderly
end.

In all of the process groups, it is expected that executing process requires the most
resource and time spent. Ideally, execution has all the activities making all necessary
plan to be performed hence this is the longest phase among all.

Project management methodology is essential to every organization and each

organization use different types of methodology that fits their needs. Methodology is
basically generalized process or system used in that particular project management
activity.

In my previous organization, as the hospital undergo to the JCI journey all process
groups were very clearly implemented. Initiating process was done by the Senior
Leadership Team while Kick-off meeting was done with many stakeholders who will be
included to be trained in JCI and until they will do the accreditation. All were defined
with careful planning and with defined good business strategy.

4. One part of project management is communications management and during project

execution, it is considered very crucial. This process comprises of gathering information
to create, distribute, store, retrieve and dispose of project communications in
conjunction with the communications management plan. All the process is essential
since communication must be clear and well defined to avoid misleading information.
Moreover, project communications and updates to project documents, the project
management plan and organizational process assets are the main outcome of
management communications process.
In any type of project management, there are different ways to issue communication
that is through formal and informal communication. Formal communication is mostly
written such as detailed reports, emails or Web pages. There are some individuals that
prefers this type of communications since it is clear. However, there are also those
people with different preference and are comfortable with informal communication.
 Informal communication is more purposeful in building relationship to motivate the
people.

Non-verbal way of expressing oneself includes person’s tone of voice and body
language. These two are very important since communication is about relaying
important messages and with proper tone of voice and body gesture, the interaction
among individuals will definitely be improved. Hence, improvement in the project
management will be greatly impacted.

5. One example of a real project that will be describe has the project title: Safe care
patient checklist: a co-designed intervention to promote safe, high quality practice and
improved outcomes. This project is done in University Hospital in Southampton NHS
Foundation trust and headed by team leader Dr. Mike Clancy.

In this project, the scope is the development of two forms as a feedback form based on
the ideas in Gawunde’s Checklist Manifesto. First form was given to ED patients and
second was given to Pediatric ward patients or parents of the patients. These forms are
focused in complaints, patient satisfaction, errors and safety and lastly the activity
during the trial. These checklist is a way to know and generate on how to prevent
undesired patient experience. On the other hand, time frame was not described in the
literature of this project. Lastly, design and development costs were the only mentioned
as it is mentioned that in this project the project management was primarily
developmental and the economic aspect was not their primary focus. These were the
design and development costs as follows, Your Visit forms was £836 which is
approximately 0.40 per form (250 first run, and two batches of 1000). The cost of design
of the Your Stay and I have a question forms and associated posters for display in the
ward areas was £800. The print run of 250 of each form was £125 or 0.25 per form.

Moreover, in this project there are many challenges as stated in the literature. To name
a few, project team disruptions: periods of significant ill health and compassionate leave
(and a more joyful maternity leave for one member), significant unplanned, urgent
refurbishments in Pediatrics delayed the trial start and dented morale and engagement
and others. On the other hand, there were also great outcomes cited specifically to
learnings such as; great ideas need testing in your setting - the logic behind checklists
appears sound, and the idea is very positively received by patients and staff but they do
not use them in the ways you hope they will and the process evaluation in addition to
analyzing outcome measures is essential to fully understand what happened to the
intervention.
Reading the entire project management literature specially at the very learning of the
project managers, it seems they encountered unfavorable responses from the staff
having to do the procedure. Moreover, as per the project managers they are not
recommending the intervention to be continued. In my opinion, they failed to solidify
the doctors and the nurses as stakeholders to pursue continuously the project as to
grow on positive attitude in this project. The positive attitude of doctors and nurses
could help sustain the project to continue until they will have more data to finalize
better result.

Reference:

13. Uni Hospital Southampton_Safer Care Checklist.pdf (health.org.uk)