Improving Problem Processes

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Communications Management  

A new hire comes into an organization and gets trained on the project processes. They see something that doesn’t make sense and asks about it. The reply--“We’ve always done it that way”--is accompanied by a shrugging of shoulders. This scenario can be a symptom of a huge problem on the project. Perhaps there is a good reason for a process, but there are few processes that cannot be improved.

It is very dangerous for an organization to be complacent about processes. Projects will fail over and over again if the processes are not improving over time. At the very least, they will suffer from the same issues. Improving processes and fighting complacency should be the job of every project manager and every project team member. How can you help do that?

Ask Questions
Processes will stagnate if the questions are not asked. A project team that is not asking questions and being diligent in searching for answers will continue to turn out work--but will also see the same issues pop up over and over again. Those issues might be a lack of risk mitigation, badly defined requirements or even consistently late work.

Someone on the project team should be asking why those problems are showing up in the project. The project manager should be the first out of the gate, but really anyone working on the project should be able to ask the hard questions. Once the …

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