System Application Roll Out – Program Management

Situation

This national health care organisation provides home health services to its customers for therapy, nursing and personal services out of 45 sites across Canada. The sites were using a mixture of manual and two COTS applications to support managing requests, resources, scheduling, tracking and billing for the home health services. An application system had been created in-house to replace the current applications. It was developed from a clinician system application that the client had been using successfully for many years. For more information visit this site read more here

A pilot roll out of the initial version of the application system had recently been completed. The client’s approach was to update the system to handle any site specific requirements not covered in the base system and to migrate the sites to the new system. The roll out program covered defining the site-specific requirements, updating the system code to meet the requirements, cleaning up and migrating the existing data into the system database, and preparing the site staff for the implementation, including readiness adoption and training programs.

The program was more complex and challenging than had been anticipated, and was experiencing delays and some frustrations. Updates to the application were causing some unexpected side effects and the migration process modules were more difficult to develop than expected.

Requirement

Schroeder and Schroeder was engaged to strengthen program coordination and communications activities. The Programme Manager focus was on facilitating and assisting in coordinating program activities.

Specific assigned tasks were to determine and communicate the status, progress and issues of the in-flight site roll out, and to start planning the next 4-5 roll outs and then the full roll out to the remaining sites in the following year.

Challenges

The challenges we faced in conducting this project related to:

• Defining the PM function: the role, accountabilities and authorities and a project charter were not prepared or documented in advance. Suggestions for their content were not agreed upon.
• Establishing executive governance and decision making.
• Getting project staff to participate, take action and provide information. There was no direct reporting structure.
• The focus was fully on the immediate site roll out and not on medium and long term planning.
• The project participating groups were not formally coordinating their tasks. Each group was working on their own processes and there was only ad hoc as required meetings.
• Balancing time and effort between helping with the immediate roll out and moving forward with the planning. The consultant was then also asked to chair the weekly site implementation check-in meeting.
• Project management frameworks or standards were not in place. There was an ongoing initiative to create these. Some status reporting documents were being created, but these were not followed across department boundaries.
• Interpersonal clashes, conflicts at several organizational levels.
• Limited PM tools available (MS Project, Visio, Collaboration)

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