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Schedule Associates has provided a range of services to a diverse series of customers all of whom are trying to improve the way in which projects are managed in their organizations so that their operations can be more productive. Here's how we've been of assistance to just one of our valued customers...
Background Continued growth at Partners HealthCare System in Massachusetts created an IT organization with over 1,000 members, several hundred of whom had project management responsibility, but little knowledge of project management techniques. Like most IT environments, there was an abundance of projects, most spanning diverse end-user communities and many involving the latest technologies. Projects commonly involved applications from outside firms and highly complex application and systems integration. Challenges/Opportunities Opportunities included more efficient utilization of resources, gaining an improved understanding of what IT resources were working on, particularly the split between support and project work, ensuring IT staff was working on value-adding work, better visibility of resource needs in the future, consistency in the way projects are managed throughout the organization, improved ability to report to the business areas on the status of IT projects and increased control of projects in order to provide the desired scope within the agreed-to timeline. Challenges to achieving these opportunities included unclear expectations for project managers, a culture that was not aware of what project management is or its value, far-reaching IT projects meaning that diverse stakeholders in all areas of the hospitals and healthcare organization would need to be educated as to the value of the new project management methods, no IT-wide project management software. Solutions Schedule Associates' involvement has spanned several years and our assistance has evolved as needs have changed and the level of project management maturity has grown. Working with our counterparts in the IT arena we've defined process and skill gaps and, in light of those gaps, objectives for training have been established. Based on these objectives a variety of project management courses were defined, created and delivered ranging in length from 4 hours to 2.5 days. A unique aspect of the current round of training is that it tightly couples project management processes with use of a project management software application, PlanView. Previous training sessions addressed either the concepts or the tool, but never both. Feedback from participants suggested that, while both sessions were of good quality, they remained uncertain about how to actually implement the practices using the tool. To address this, a new class was designed featuring two instructors, one from our customer's organization who facilitates training on PlanView while the Schedule Associates instructor facilitates the project management portion of the session. The interweaving of concepts and their application, coupled with frequent hands-on activities, both in the software and as group activities, has made for engaging, but more importantly, effective training. Results To date, several hundred project managers have been trained and all new hires likely to be involved with project management are trained as well. Evaluations from participants in the courses have been consistently positive, but more importantly, behavior changes are being noticed and the quality of project plans is improving. Specifically,
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