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Friday | 5 December, 2008
CIO
A Formula for Alignment
Take an equal measure of business experts and IT professionals. Mix well. And watch IT-enabled processes flourish
Tom Abendroth 06 March, 2007 12:21:39

How to Align Your Project Team

The strategies for creating such integrated teams are straightforward:

1. Forge the project team from individuals who are respected subject matter experts and who are inspired by the greater goal of the initiative (for us, improving the quality of the care we deliver). If backfilling the vacancies created by these individuals in their work units is not painful, then you probably have selected the wrong individuals.

2. Establish two leaders for every project team: a project leader from IT to perform traditional project management functions and drive technical decisions, along with a process leader from the business unit to drive workflow redesign decisions. This pairing mirrors the inherent duality of IT-enabled transformation: technical execution married to effective process redesign.

3. Require that team members have a common space, common goals and a functional dependence on one another to succeed. If you demand that they interact intimately on all aspects of project work, the cultural differences that exist among them will soften over time to create a new, shared culture.

4. Establish a forum for integrated decision making, where team members from all disciplines (for us, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, clinical technologists, medical records personnel and IT professionals) must contribute. This forum becomes the nerve centre of the project. Eradicate decision making in silos, because there are few decisions that affect only a single discipline within a team-based workflow.

5. Allow no party to proceed along an independent path. Nourish the commitment to multidisciplinary integration where it exists; force it where it does not; and highlight the successes achieved through collaboration.

We all will complete major projects in our careers. Some will fade, especially as advances in IT transform our grand accomplishments of the past into trivial exercises in the future. But the memory of our EMR team's maturation will never leave me. I am excited by the new generation of clinicians who are embracing IT early in their careers, working alongside IT professionals who are learning the processes of health-care. Through this evolution, the landscape of health-care IT will never be the same.

Tom Abendroth is CIO of Penn State Milton S Hershey Medical Centre and the Penn State College of Medicine. He can be reached attabendroth@psu.edu

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