Week 2

By Lili Hozakowska:

I immediately thought about our project management class last year during today’s challenge. Having already taken that class, the challenge was not nearly as difficult as it could have been. This led me to the realization that having appropriate background and experience is essential. Of course I already knew this to an extent, for example you wouldn’t hire a McDonald’s cashier for a CFO role just because he knows how to handle money; but if that cashier went to school for an Accounting degree, or moved up the ranks at McDonald’s until he reached the C-suite, then that is a completely different story.

Our team was able to flush out the many steps that the appointed project manager would have to do, in part due to our own project management experience. But I then wondered about how Larry would function as a Project Sponsor. His profile from our last class indicated that he had a lot of experience with implementation and had climbed the corporate ladder meaning he was once in the same position as his employees (despite becoming CIO outside of IBM). Now all of the profiles were missing a significant amount of information so I can’t know this with certainty, but I’d like to know more about Larry’s leadership skills.

He certainly understands the technical side of the work and has experience with implementation which is great for a Project Sponsor to have. However, does he understand the project management side? How involved would he be in this process? He’s had extensive implementation experience, so would he integrate himself into the project? Would he micro-manage? Or to look at it from another angle: would Larry even have time for the project? He just moved to a new city and just began his CIO role in a completely new industry. He’s never had to deal with an EHR system - as far we know - so he’ll have to learn from the beginning. Is it possible he feels overwhelmed? Or yet another angle: would he be able to scale his past experiences? He has only worked for large companies, implementing corporate-wide systems, but Grand Vie Long-Term Care Center is only a small 80-bed facility. Will he know who to involve in the project? Will he have to scale back his ideas? And if so, will he be able to?

A number of these questions could likely be answered if we knew a little more about Larry, but what I’ve taken away from today’s class is the importance of knowledge, background, and experience. Taking this informatics course may not allow us to understand what developers are saying, but it will give us a high-level understanding of the world in which tech and healthcare overlap.