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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...

Project Talk: ORIS Integration Testing

The ORIS project team has been busy preparing for this week with PICIS. It is integration testing time! It is time to see if all the parts and flow work together. So far, the testing has been going well. Some hiccups, but nothing, yet, that would be a show stopper. We have two more days to go to flush out the issues.

Next on my agenda is getting the needed construction signed off so I can order the needed equipment. Also need to work to figure out the proper application stress tests that we can perform on the application.

Project Talk - Communication, Communication, Communication

Here is another semi regular post on my observations while being a tech lead on the implementation team of an OR system.

It has been said that many projects fail because of the lack of communication/organizational. While, this project is no where near meeting its demise, it has met what I would call its first communication speed bump. To get back on track meetings were called, issues were discussed and hopefully we have a better understanding of what is needed to keep the communications lines open and flowing.

The take away here is don't always take the academic approach to project management communication. Be ready to adjust communication methods on the fly. I am learning to make sure to communicate early and communicate often.

Project Talk - What I learned last week?

I am taking a lead tech role on a new project implementing a comprehensive OR system.

What did I learn this week? You are only as good as your supplier. Even when when you try to make sure that you request and order the correct parts, if you are not shipped the correct parts you still just as bad off as if you ordered the wrong parts in the first place.

Replacement parts were sent and recieved with the supplier picking up the costs. However, the damage was done. Extra work and time was needed to make up for supplier's mistake.