As a project manager, team members can be classified in four categories:

1. Those willing to support you and worthy of trust.
2. Fence-sitters who will support you once they see you can handle the job.
3. Those who will need some extra time and energy to be turned into supporters.
4. Those who do not currently support you and never will.

Observing behaviors in meetings and office conservations will offer hints:

1. People engaged in light conversations that suddenly stop when you come into view are not in category 1.
2. Team members who engage in excessive or unexplained ex parte conversations with your peers or superiors are in category 4.
3. Team members who are eager to show off any effort that furthers your agenda are most likely in category 1.
4. Team members who challenge you or your agenda in a constructive manner are most likely in categories 2 or 3.
5. Staff who challenge you with statements aimed at making it appear you are inexpert are almost certainly in category 4.

So we had decided to announce the official death of the old incomplete healthcare system (read Healing the Dead) and will start working on a new project. We need to:

1. Have a look from the top most view to know what are the emerging requirements for healthcare systems worldwide


2. Prioritize and filter these requirements as per the local market's demands


3. Define our project scope accordingly

Professor Bryan Bergeron, from HST Division in Harvard Medical School & MIT, USA presented the technology requirements for the healthcare in his presentation “Emerging Information Technologies in Healthcare” that he presented in the Saudi e-Health Conference in Riyadh, May 2006. Here is the outline of his presentation:

Interests in healthcare systems have dramatically evolved during the past two decades. Interests on mid 90’s were mainly:

• Practice Management SW
• Voice Recognition HW
• Personal Digital Assistants
• High-Speed Internet Connections
• eMail
• Wireless Networks (WiFi)
• Digital Cameras
• Online CME (Continuing Medical Education)
• Online Medical Databases
• Scheduling Software
• Medical Errors
• Digital Records
• Process Modeling
• Web Search Engines
• Personal Computing
• Digital Imaging

While on 2006 interests have grown to include:

• RHIOs (Regional Health Information Organization)
• P4P
• CRM
• HER
• PACS (Picture Archive Communication System)
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Asynchronous Consults

System’s stakeholders have also increased to include more people from different departments each with his own list of interest:

Patient Interests:

• CRM
• Syndication
• Disease Portals
• Remote Consults
• Personalized Medicine
• Interactive Scheduling
• Home Monitoring
• Patient Education

Departments

• PACS
• Data Marts
• Telemedicine
• Specialty Procedures
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Surgical Planning

Business Managers

• ERP
• AR/AP
• Payroll
• Asset Tracking
• Supply Chain Management
• Benchmarking

Physicians

• CPOE (Computer Practitioner Order Entry)
• Syndication
• Surgical Robots
• Physician Scheduling
• LMS (Learning Management Systems), Simulators & Simulations
• Automated Transcription
• Smart Medical Systems
• Transaction Monitoring
• Visualization
  ICD10

Research

• Data Management
• Clinical Database Integration
• Data Visualization
• Grid Computing

Nurse

• Coding
• Patient Tracking
• Remote Patient Monitoring
• LMS/Simulators/Simulations
• Robotic Pharmacy Delivery
• Syndication

Admin

• CRM
• Asset Tracking
• Business Intelligence
• Operations Management
• Performance Management
• Knowledge Management
• Telecommunications
• P4P (DEA/RVU)

Pharmacy

• Automation
• Error Reduction
• Robotic Delivery
• Barcode/RFID Tracking
• E-Prescribing

"Khaled", one old coworker that I worked with 6 years back had just left to a new IT solutions company and a new Executive Manager position. He was looking to give the company a push by entering a new sector in the software industry and fortunately that was the healthcare. He consulted a third coworker "Yousef" who has a long history with successful healthcare systems implementations, and consulted me for my history in systems development and design in general and in healthcare systems in specific.

The first thing that we talked about was my orphan founding project and the possibility to use it as a launch base, in other word to heal it after death. The only way to know is by reviewing it with the team then evaluate it based to the new requirements. We started our sessions and it didn't take us so long to figure out four main critical points:

1. Healthcare requirements on 1999 are very different than those on 2006 especially to the number of features that the user would expect today and the number of users that will use the system


2. The goal of the project was to reach clinics and polyclinics while the goal of the new project is to reach big hospitals


3. My project wasn't complete even with its 1999 requirements so it will still need lots of work to become useful


4. Some modules were built on wrong assumptions (due to the absence of the customer) so some rework will be needed to what has already been done

Assuming that original requirements are about 40% of the new ones, what has been done is about 50% of what it is supposed to be, and that 50% of it needs rework we reached the conclusion that we have less than 10% of the new requirements achieved.

The decision was to leave the dead project resting in piece and to start a new project from the beginning. We can of course copy-paste some code later on but from a project point of view the founding project had officially dead.

I was a software developer since 1996. I stared working on developing healthcare systems since 2000 during my job with a team of programmers in one of the local software companies. I left the company by the end of 2000 before the system is completed. At that time, I had no experience on documenting requirements and all what I know is to set and write code. The Systems Development Life Cycle SDLC was theoretical and a waste of time. “Save the time that you will waste on analysis in something more valuable like coding”.

So I decided that I will invest my new knowledge that I gained and will build a small healthcare billing system to serve small clinics and polyclinics. I was working at home during my free hours. No one was sponsoring my project, no one was providing requirements and feedback comments, and no one was waiting or expecting for any deliverables except me! I had no plan to where I’m going to or where I want to be. All what I remember from those days was the very long hours that I spent in writing code.

The project started with a lot of vigor, hopes, and dreams. It lacked however all the basics of a successful software projects:

1. It had no project plan
2. It had no stakeholders (especially the owner, the customer, and the client)
3. It had no requirements defined thus no scope

From the perspective of a project manager, the above project was a waste of time or what I like to call a “founding project”. The vigor started to fade out, interests went down, and priorities started to change to more useful things. It was the mid of 2002 when the system’s folder had been zipped and archived and a year and a half of work went down the drain.

I started my master degree in Capella University www.capella.edu and graduated on September 2005 to see software development and managing software projects with different eyes. I will use this blog to share you my progress in a new healthcare project that I’m managing and I will expect your comments so our experience will be exchanged. Life an endless series of experiences.

“Most people don’t plan to fail, they simply fail to plan”

In most professions, success requires the efficient use of established practices, frameworks, tools, and techniques. It has been proven, that creating a plan and establishing procedures can bring order and efficiency to any initiative or project. The plan can be as simple as a “to do” list for today’s tasks and as complex as a 5 years research, development, costing, recruitment, marketing, and production plan for a chemical products factory. Utilizing lessons learned and continuous improvements will gradually deliver projects and initiatives successfully or at least better than before.

The ability to get things done requires an understanding of both formal and informal nature of human interactions, and also to understand the power and politics. These understandings are known as the “Soft Skills” and Project Manager's soft skills will of course be a very important factor in leading a team to a successful completion of the project. Soft Skills are tightly related to the talent and the character of the person and they can hardly be learned, but training however can help improving them.