Project Talk: OR Project

It has been a long time since I have posted an update on the PICIS OR Project deployment. The good news is that it has been a year since starting and we are in the final days before deploying the last major piece of the application suite. The bad news is that it has been a long year and specifically the last few weeks I have been spending many late nights at the hospital.

So what have I learned (reminded) so far in this project.

1) You are only as good as your suppliers. No matter how well you research, plan, and test out hardware if you can not get the right equipment in a timely manner you will spend a lot of extra time trying to get the corrected hardware that should have been ordered in first place.

2) Construction takes time. Just let it role. However, it would be nice if the champions of the project would really understand that sometimes there are things that are just out of your control.

3) Even with all the testing you do on hardware equipment, you will still get lemons. I had a high failure rate on a particular type of hardware. Sometimes it was bad design in hardware. Other times it was just installation oversights. When the dust settles I might go into more details. One phrase for companies; you can never do enough quality control!

4) At some point you have to ignore the pitfalls, poor design, and idiosyncrasies of the software. Learn the limits, learn the workaround, if any, and just deploy the darn thing. Later you can put together a team, build another product that is feature rich and fix all the “little” issues of the current software. Maybe you can sell it back to the vendor for a profit and revenue sharing.

5) Even with a great deployment team there are only 24 hours in a day. Sometimes one needs to sleep. Champions remember it is not that we don’t want to get everything done with a blink of an eye, we just have limits in an active hospital OR. It is on our list.

6) People will change their minds over and over and over and over...again and still expect to the time line to not change. Become Superman and make it happen.

...more later...

Comments

[Tristan]

LOL that about sums up Project management. Project management is much like war the best laid plans all collapse once the enemy is engaged LOL.