Anticlue

A visit to the Adirondacks

Fortunately, I was able to spend the last week in upstate New York, visiting friends and family. If you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, one of the cooler things to do is visit the Adirondack museum. It is an gathering of about 18 different buildings celebrating the history and way of life in the Adirondacks. For those visiting the area, plan to spend about half a day wandering through and enjoying the mountain area and lake views, Lunch at the café is recommended. The view is amazing.

Establish a Resource Planning Process

Lately, I've been playing with a way to manage resource demand for upcoming project work. There are gaps or problems, which I believe are common place. I'll share them here for others.

First, even with the education provided, there is still a disconnect in the IT leadership minds as to what is project work and what is normal run and maintain work. Currently as a group we are walking through this distinction with normal run and maintain work versus project work. This is a problem area as it is difficult to quantify demand when one receives ongoing project resourcing. However, my discussing the issues, I am certain we can clear the haze.

Secondly, we have not been fully utilizing our time reporting system to quantify averages of where we place our time. One of the key constraints was the available reports, however we are working through this constraint. By the end of the month, we will have a good highlevel snap shot of our time spent in project work and run and maintain mode. While the past is not indicative of the future, this will provide a metric for planning purposes.

Finally, we are expanding on a format (probably in excel and access) to roll up our project demand for the upcoming months. This will place demand at a team level for upcoming project work. It has been illuminating to plan the next years plan with our current resourcing. We are highly overcommitted on the clinical side, as the demand for services are significantly higher than the resources available. Through our governance process and collaboration with the CNO, we should be able to move forward with the key endeavors.

A finding from this exercise, is the need to include resources for projects from the hospital and IT side in the project capital request. Not including the resourcing causes the resources to be pulled from operations, this lowers the quality of your operational support.