Written by Neil Rivenburgh
The October Healthcare forum attendees were enthralled with the experiences of Jill Morrisey, CEO of Camp Twin Lakes. Jill began by sharing her impressive career running neuroscience programs at Piedmont Hospital and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She discussed how she is able to wear all of these hats and pull from the varied experience each time she faces a new challenge.
After years of working in large hospital systems, she was looking forward to a role that would be a fun and carefree experience – casual dress, working outdoors at camp.
Camp Twin Lakes provides a safe place for special needs children to meet others like themselves and have a development plan that helps them grow. “Through intentional play, we develop mindful and confident children who are prepared to triumph over challenges. By learning perseverance, resilience, and a sense of community, our campers leave transformed and capable of extraordinary things.”
It takes a big team to run the camp. Jill and her people work with about 65 partners to enable it to operate. It provides an experience for 10,000 kids. She spends a lot of her time raising funds to keep the camp running and growing. Jill's passion to help kids build life skills, friendships and self-esteem propels her and camp volunteers to serve at Camp Twin Lakes.
Jill developed operational policies and procedures to run an efficient and sustainable camp. She shared an enlighten example of how project management was needed to manage and maintain Camp Twin Lakes farm. This farm consisted of 70 cows and 200 chickens who produces food for the camp. The importance of farm, led Jill to work closely with the camp farmer to develop a project plan that can be trained to other staff to run the farm efficiently end to end.
Jill talked about the importance of having contingency plans (“Think about Plan B … then Plan C … and Plan D”). She emphasized to “Plan as much as possible then think through every ‘what if’.” Jill also address the need for Enterprise Risk Management for every project. Utilizing a risk matrix enabled her to plan for various risk that can occur. Risk were ranked on a scale from “Remote” chance of occurring to “Very Likely” and how bad the impact could be from “Insignificant” to “Critical.”
Jill shared the project management process that is used for the camp.
- Program Evaluation
- Initiate Planning
- Program Design
- Training and Contingency Planning
- Implementation
She also stressed the importance of an effective communication plan. Effective communication is imperative especially for first time campers, as parents are very anxious when their kids have never been away from them. Therefore, frequent communication is needed to maintain parent’s confidence and trust in the camp abilities to take care of their kids.
Overall, Jill Morrisey delivered an inspiring message on how project management is used at Camp Twin Lakes to provide a wonderful experience to so many children.
Please join us Tuesday, November 27th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Joint Technology & Healthcare Forum for the: Keynote Presentation: “Living the Innovator’s Lifestyle” presented by Rob Wilson, Professional Speaker, Author & Storyteller
Location: Hewlett Packard Enterprise
5555 Windward Parkway, Alpharetta, Georgia 30004
About PMI
Atlanta Chapter serves Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.