People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Is Healthcare Project Management Different?

 Well, there is no doubt about, Rich Maltzman and I straddle the world of traditional project management and what might be termed, different (or maybe non-traditional) project management.  While we deliver training in the principles of project management, PMP preparation, and project management certification, among others, we have also expanded our view of project management.  As Rich so eloquently blogged about, we have assertions about project managers and sustainable project management.  We are also interested in project managers and healthcare project management.  One of the questions I am often asked is what is so different about healthcare project management (similar to the question, what is different about green project management)? 

Some would argue that there is no difference between managing any project and managing a healthcare project.  But if you think about it, each and every industry has their own quirks, uniqueness if you will, therefore, managing a project in different industries, whether it is IT, construction, entertainment, etc., requires knowledge of those unique qualities.  I assert that the healthcare industry has some significant qualities that deserve further study. 

During the last nine years of teaching, I had my students take a personality test available on-line.  I keep a record of the results, by personality type, not student.  I compiled those results into an informal study of my student’s personalities.  There are much different results from my students in the healthcare industry as opposed to those on-campus or at the various business locations I teach.  While not surprising to me, and probably not to you, those results tend to support the uniqueness of health care workers.  Most of the workers fall in to the category of guardian.  A guardian personality tends to more protective of those they interact with.  They are family oriented, and I don’t necessarily mean immediate family, but adoptive of those around them to form a family.

They are serious and concerned, traits that are critical to their jobs.  Additionally, guardians are very much procedural oriented, and follow processes, another great trait for health care workers.

There are projects themselves within the health care environment that make it unique.  While one can argue that other industries have life and death situations, there is no doubt that the healthcare industry has them.  Therefore, some, and I’ll go out on a limb and say most, projects initiated in the healthcare environment have some aspect of life and death involved.  Some examples that I have seen over the years are:

• Design a template to gain approval to land and deploy a helicopter at a medical facility

The team leader for an air ambulance service was “reinventing” an approval process every time there was a request from a medical facility to take advantage of the service.  Because the requirements were standard; distance from the buildings, size of the landing area, approach procedures, etc, it was logical to undertake a project to build a template that only needed to be tweaked for a medical facility’s request.  By developing the template, reduced the approval times, thus potentially saving lives.

• Implement a “safe room” in a psychiatric facility.

A need was determined that there weren’t ample facilities to accommodate agitated psychiatric patients.  A project was undertaken to design, plan, and implement a safe room, with padded walls and flooring to accommodate a patient who may become agitated in a particular situation and needs a safe place to recover.  The padded walls and floors allowed the patients to thrash without danger of injuring themselves against unforgiving floor and walls.  While the primary purpose was to insure the safety of the agitated patient, it also protected the staff by allowing them to take the patient somewhere safe, away from the general population and potential weapons like chairs, tables, and lamps.

• A project to reduce sharp injuries in the operating room.  

Sharp injuries are better characterized by being pricked by a dirty needle.  The potential of injury by exposure to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Hepatitis B Virus, or Hepatitis C Virus, are real risks to hospital staff, especially nurses.  According to some studies done by the International Health care Worker Safety Center, University of Virginia, and their Global Initiative for Health care Worker Safety and Occupational Exposure, “Needle sticks and sharp injuries are the most common cause of occupational infections among health care workers, responsible for an estimated 1,000 HIV, 66,000 hepatitis B and 16,000 hepatitis C cases annually to health workers around the globe (World Health Organization 2003)”[i]  One of the hospital I worked with wanted to further reduce their sharp injuries.  A project was developed to identify the potential areas of most exposure and to reduce that exposure by developing better hypodermic needle handling and disposal.

• A project to develop a new hospital gown. 

That was of particular interest to me because existing hospital gowns can be very uncomfortable and confusing as to which was to put them on.  There was an OBGY specialist in one of my classes and we talked about my confusion with the hospital gowns.  His advice was to put it on whichever way you want to because it really didn’t matter to him or other doctors.  They would get to where they need to go no matter which way the gown is donned.  However, while not being a life and death situation, patient comfort is a concern.  Projects will be undertaken for that reason.

• Another non-life threatening situation, but a justifiable project, is a beautification or gentrification effort.  Hospitals and medical facilities are not immune from competition.  One way to try to entice patients to your facility is to give it more “curb appeal.”  New, luxurious entrances, fountains in lobbies, piano players in waiting rooms, coffee shops, gourmet dining, are all projects aimed at differentiating one medical facility form another.

Those are but a few of the many projects that are initiated everyday by medical facilities all over the world.   Make no mistake, they are projects and whether large or small, need to be properly managed to get as much as possible out of the limited resources available.  Look for more blogs about healthcare, sustainability, and traditional project management, here.  Also, for more information on healthcare project management please see my book. 

With this introductory blog post we’d like to introduce our view of what is sometimes called “Green Project Management”, or as we like to more accurately describe it, sustainability thinking in project management.

You can get a great digest of our philosophy with EarthPM’s five assertions, but the gist of it isfairly simple. By taking a longer-term, more holistic view of your project’s context, you do better, your project does better, your stakeholders do better, and – the focus of today’s posting – your project’s product does better.

What do we mean by better?

That’s really the key. We realize that stepping back and doing a ‘deeper dive’ into how your project – and its product – fit into the areas of corporate social responsibility and environmental, and expanded economic concerns (the so-called Triple Bottom Line) is going to cause some extra work for your team, and may even involve more expense and schedule. So why the heck would you do it?

We remind you of the Cost of Quality teachings of Philip Crosby, who, in effect, said, you can pay me now or pay me later. Build quality in. If you try to bolt it on later, you will pay dearly later.

To answer the question, “what do we mean by better?”, we assert that investing in up-front sustainability thinking pays off in:

• Better (more thorough and correct) risk identification, analysis, response, monitoring, and closing
• Improved linkage to enterprise goals
• Improved morale
• Enhanced image for your organization
• Increased transparency
• Possible huge cost avoidance in the operation of your project’s product (see first bullet)
• And yes, a lower environmental impact (although, you can see it is only one of several benefits, and is not meant to be the ONLY reason for including sustainability in your project’s plan)

Doing the above does require a sort of mind-shift for many project managers. These folks – for very good reasons – will tell you (paraphrased composite of actual quotes):

“I am not a product manager, I’m a project manager. As long as I deliver a product that meets customer requirements, I’ve done my job. I could care less about long-term impacts of the product, especially if dealing with them now them makes the project more expensive, late, or causes the product to fail to meet the basic requirements. Also, I have enough to worry about with the constraints I already face. I don’t need more constraints. Go away and leave me alone”.

We’re here to tell you that it’s not that simple today.

We’re here to tell you that your enterprise likely has mission, vision, and value statements aspiring to new heights of corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and transparency, and that they are intended to reach you as project managers.

In fact, “reach” is way too weak a word. The president of Shell Oil, Marvin Odom, was recently quoted as saying that he has to drive his project managers to convey these sustainability goals into their projects and the products of their projects.  Yep, he specifically calls out his project managers!  You can read the entire interview (a very good one!) right here.

Even better, watch the video of the interview here.

We think one way to do that is to think of yourself as a “prod-ject” manager, using the double meaning of the word “prod”, first to evoke the word product, and also to use its meaning “to rouse or incite”.

So this is the crux of our posting. Think about your project’s outcome. Think hard not only about what it is supposed to do when it is ‘first turned on’ or ‘thrown over the wall’, but when it is running in its steady state.  Are there any attributes of that steady-state operation that are warning signals to you as project manager on CSR, environmental, or long-term economic problems? Shouldn’t those signals be read and used in your planning?

Of course they should.

Projects, programs and portfolios are the essential channel for your organization’s ideas and strategies into longer-term operations. 

For reference, see Stanford Univerisity/IPS Learning's Stragegic Execution Framework, pictured below.

We’ll blog again about that soon. But for now, know this: without you as the key “prod-ject”manager, the full and true intent of your company’s mission, and its resulting execution strategies, which NEED to get to your organization's operations, could get clogged-up right under your watch.

Don’t be a bottleneck, be an accelerator. Be a prod-ject manager.