Emory's Amcom Upgrade project was chartered to upgrade the hardware and software (application, database, and authentication) for Emory's paging systems, including the overhead and emergency paging systems in Emory hospitals and clinics; individual page-to-cellphone systems for physicians; OnCall calendars; and Emory Healthcare’s switchboard and directory information.
Direct beneficiaries of this upgrade also included physicians and staff at Atlanta’s VA Medical Center, Grady Health System, and Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Hospital. The project team was composed almost entirely of IT staff who had never before worked on a project of this size and complexity: Emory Healthcare is a $1.7 Billion organization with 14,000 employees including ~3,000 physicians and ~6,000 paging users.
Challenges were immediately apparent: the charter underwent fourteen revisions before approval; the sponsor was not fully supportive of losing local control over the paging database; and most of the project team had never before worked with paging technology and healthcare customers. Recognizing this, the project manager took a new approach with the team and instituted an agile process of daily status meetings along with two-week sprints to focus development and integration work. Due to their daily interaction the team quickly came to understand that their stakeholders had different and sometimes competing needs. Daily stand-ups, iterative development, and deliberate prioritization of project deliverables ensured that critical stakeholders also understood that balancing their needs with those of others entailed making tough decisions in a timely and transparent fashion.
The project manager also used more traditional PMI-based processes and techniques. Quality is a critical issue for healthcare systems where there are no second chances. But the immense tasks of data cleaning and migration, coupled with a radical change in physical infrastructure, had the potential to give short shrift to quality, risk and communication/training management. Thus, for the first time, more than one project manager was assigned: while continuing to manage their other projects, one PM became the Quality Manager and another became the Training Manager. By carving out specific deliverables, these two PM’s independently managed portions of the project while assuring complete interdependence on the master project's deliverables and deadlines.
In the end, this eighteen-month project was a success. With only five minutes of allowable downtime on a Thursday at 5:55am, even the onsite vendor team said they had never been a part of such a smooth cutover. Beyond technology, however, this project instituted sustainable organizational change: Call Center roles were redefined; new relationships with physicians led to plans for a Phase 2; and the emergency notification system was adopted by Emory’s Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response.
This project deserves to be recognized. It is a mark of maturity for both an organization and a project manager to recognize that flexibility of thought and of process can be more important than rigid adherence to checklists and templates. By combining a number of seemingly disparate PM practices into one project, the project manager was able to keep her team creatively productive, her stakeholders well informed, and her senior leadership actively supportive.