Team Health: The Pulse of Team Management (Part 4)--Percussion

Dr. Deepa Bhide, PMP is a physician and currently an independent healthcare IT and project management consultant. She has a postgraduate degree in Pediatrics and Neonatology from the University of Health Sciences, India. Deepa is an advocate of using project management in healthcare and related domains. She has worked extensively in the confluence of clinical medicine, IT and project management domains with hands-on experience in managing projects from conception to closure.

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Drawing a parallel between clinical medicine and project management, the first part of Team Health: The Pulse of Team Management was to introduce the concept of team health and the applicability of the physical exam technique to team management. Part 2 looked at the first of four techniques (inspection), while Part 3 covered palpation.

Thank you for being there in this journey from "suspicion to decision." Drawing parallels between processes from two domains, the objective of this series is to demonstrate the relevance/applicability of the best practices of clinical medicine to project management, specifically to "team health." It is meant to guide project managers to deal with complex team situations, either nurturing a team back to good health or maintaining its wellness. This part of the series deals with the third technique of the physical examination: percussion (probing the team)!

From a clinical medicine standpoint, percussion is striking a body part to produce a characteristic tone or sound. Sound produced during percussion is influenced by the density of the underlying body part, and hence varies in quality.

In other words, it is a further probing of the suspicious body part to detect abnormality. Probing is important to confirm suspicion from the earlier techniques. The following aspects of percussion help the examiner make a relevant …

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