Case Study: Level 3

Regional PMO Manager.

Darbour Group Hospitals (DGH)
*N.B. All names here, including country names, are imaginary to avoid any ethical conflicts. All companies
mentioned are purely fiction and do not reflect data from any real companies.

This case study is not meant to evaluate your technical competency, as much as it is meant to evaluate your core and
leadership competencies. So do not fret if you have not received case financial records and such; it is not what we
are looking to evaluate in this exercise.

You have recently been appointed as the Regional PMO Manager for Darbour Group Hospitals.
Darbour Group has several hospitals spread across the Middle East and Africa, with three in Genera, a
country in Africa (Two in the Sila and one in Luz); and three in Lora, a country located in the Middle
East. The group is building two more in Genera at the moment. In addition to the hospitals, the group
also encompasses 3 IT software development companies and one construction company under its
umbrella that serve the holding itself and also cater to the market. You are thus responsible for all the
entities operating under DGH’s umbrella.
You are just appointed as the Regional PMO Manager, responsible for supporting implementation of
operational strategy, managing & overseeing the successful delivery of projects through all of the
defined phases of the project life cycle across the region; this includes providing, enabling and
supporting project prioritization, management information, financial reporting, resourceplanning and
decision making.
Organizational Structure:
Your position has one direct supervisor, the Group PMO Manager.You
supervise Lora PMO managers and their teams.

You received your post with many challenges and conflicts. First of all, you have a meeting with the
group supply chain and technical biomedical manager. You had conflicted with the group supply chain
upon which dialysis machine to purchase at the new hospitals in Genera. The specs are included in Table
1 below:
Machine 1 Machine 2
Cost $15,000 $17,000
Half-life ~10-15 years with regular ~15-17 years with regular
maintenance maintenance
Product Weight 86kg 80kg

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Dialysis Type Hemodialysis Hemodialysis; peritoneal dialysis
Dialyzers needed $1.50 per piece $0.50 per piece
Maintenance Every 6 months Every 3 months
Software Machine has an alarm system for Machine shows clear info on 10cm
detected abnormalities and 5cm x x 15cm display screen regarding
5cm LCD display screen progress of dialysis session and
alarms if abnormalities are
detected
Reserve Battery 1.50 hours 1 hour
Power 100 to 240 V AC, 50 to 60 Hz 2025 Watts
Inlet Pressure 0.12 to 0.4 MPa 0.12 to 0.6 MPa
Water Inlet Pressure 1.5 to 6.0 2.0 to 7.0
Frequency 50-60 Hz 50 Hz
Voltage 240 V 230 V
Ultrafiltration Control • 50ml
Operating Temperature 5°C to 30°C; for “integrated hot 18 to 35 Degrees Celsius
rinse” 85°C to 95°C
Relative Humidity 15 to 85% RH
Air Detection Method Ultrasonic transmission Ultrasonic Detector
measurement on blood line,
additional optical monitoring in
venous clamp
Arterial Pressure - 300 mmHg to + 280 mmHg -700 to +750 mmHg
Venous Pressure - 60 mmHg to + 520 mmHg -700 to +750 mmHg

You are convinced that machine 2 is better than machine 1, due to its longer half-life. The operations
manager and group supply chain find it too costly and think purchasing machine 1 would be more cost-
efficient on the long run. How you will solve this conflict between you and the group supply chain to
agree on one of the two machines?
Secondly, the news came to you that the team of pharmacists in Lora are not following the processes set
by the quality department to ensure that the medicines kept in the hospital’s pharmacies are kept under
the correct conditions.
Last week, one of the clinical pharmacists administered a different drug to a patient saying it was the
same chemical compound. That drug ended up causing the patient to come to the ER two hours after
taking it; it had caused a reaction with another drug he was taking for anxiety and depression. The
family is filing a lawsuit against the hospital for this issue.
When you go in deep you found that the weekly assumption meetings do not hold on a regular basis,
which led to a defect in communication between the different departments, and the lack of monitoring led
to the exit of some employees from the standards set.

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From the above, it is clear that there is a problem with the performance of your team. What is your plan to
deal with Lora hospitals’ problem? What actions will you take with your team, what KPIs will you set to
prevent this from happening again, and how will you follow them?

Finally, The Group Organizational Development (OD) Manager contacted your PMO Manager for help in
a huge project he has been requested to work on. The group OD team is required to ensure that each of its
5,000+ employees—in the main holding, hospitals, in Lora and Genera—is on an individual development
plan in addition to the group trainings they are scheduled to attend based on their position in the hierarchy
and the assessments conducted on them to gauge their skillset competency. The employees’ current level
of skillset is not known and there are no official data on where they are on a continuum. The project will
need coordination between both the OD team and the Learning and Development team (L&D). The L&D
team will be responsible for the trainings scheduling and conduction. The OD team has 50 staff members
and the L&D team has 10 staff members. Why the group OD manager contacted the PMO department is
that this task is required to be done in four months.
The PMO contacted you for consultation about how to proceed with both projects and you are expected to
guide them through the process to make sure that things are going into place; because if theydon’t meet
expectations, you’ll be the one who didn’t offer enough guidance and support.

Your Team:
Your direct point of contact are the PMO Manager who collect reports from the business units and discuss
them with you. They are energetic and assist you wherever you need them but they, aswell as the rest of
your team, are demoralized about the projects’ situation.
Your PMO Manager in Genera is Mr. Ahmed and Mrs. Mariam.

Mariam and Ahmed are constantly fighting with one another. Mariam thinks that Ahmed’s approach with
the agents in his team is too harsh and that he does not invest enough time guiding and developing their
skills. She feels he is instead more invested in bossing them around and giving them orders and not
invested at all in listening to their ideas. The agents working with Ahmed seem withdrawn and subdued,
they don’t speak up when given the chance, and they seem on the whole unhappy. The agents working
with Ahmed started going to Mariam for guidance, and she was extremely supportive to them that their
relationship with her is much better than with Ahmed. On the other hand, Ahmed feels that Mariam is not
working enough on an end product in terms of her target achievement and spends too much time trying to
avoid mistakes that she’s lost sight of the bigger picture. She also invests long hours in the Professional
Development of her team. Her agents always seem charged and enthusiastic and you see them constantly
pitching ideas and helping her out, though their target seems to not be delivered despite their hard work.

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Your Task:

- Present a strategic plan on how, through your team,

• How can you reach a suitable recommendation for dialysis machine? Outline the
benchmarks you will choose on it.
• Solve the situation with your team and how you will build their characters,
develop, and empower them?
• How you will align with other departments to facilitate your work?
• Would the OD project fit in the four months schedule? How will you measure the
impact of the project? What would be the project plan?
• What are your new ideas to enhance your department’s performance?

You will have 24 hours to submit your slide deck (presentation).

Good luck!

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