The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Deploy Over 3,500 Smart Devices Efficiently | PPP #97

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Do you have a project to deploy a 'heap load' of new stuff? Give this episode a listen to hear how I recently incorporated the 'Foundational 5' to successfully deploy almost 4,000 pieces of new equipment.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with People Process Progress in 3, 2, 1. Hey everybody, welcome back to the People Process Progress podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. Welcome to episode 97, deploying a heap load of equipment using the Foundational 5. So today I want to talk about a recent effort that I was fortunate to be part of to deploy a few thousand new devices throughout an entire health system and looking back at how we applied the foundation of five to do that. And I want to share that with you all and hope that it helps. If you're in a similar situation, whether you're putting smart devices, I know we've got a big

resurgence or surge in telemedicine again, and whatever else, whether it's for electronic health record, or people will be able to print wherever they are, whatever it is. These are the things part of that member foundational five review, leaders intent, objectives, organization, resources and communication. So I'm going to share how this worked well for the team that I supported and how I believe it can work well for you. So the first thing to me is the leader's intent. So we want to provide and I'm going to use smart devices as the example, as we wanted to provide smart devices and charging station to all the clinical areas by the date of the major system go live, right? So it sounds kind of like an objective,

but our leader's intent is above the level of objectives. It's everything, right? So what do I expect? So the expectation is all the stuff's going to be where it needs to be before we get live or by the go update. So we had a strong leader's intent, good leadership there in support. And so we went about to our objectives. And so first objective, which I think should be key, particularly for IT folks, that sometimes gets a little disconnected because we have tech driven solutions, but they should be user driven solutions, right, is to keep the end user experience in mind throughout the lifecycle of the project, right?

So regardless of what efforts we're going through, the image we want to use, the device, this and that, what is going to help these end users for me in the arena that I work in, it's healthcare workers, but it could apply to any reconstruction workers, public safety people, whatever. But we need to know how are we positively or negatively affecting the outcome for those users. The second thing, let's identify, plan for, and assess the risk throughout the life cycle of the project. So that's kind of a thing we should do as project managers overall, but it's something we were very proactive in that was very helpful, especially, and as you all probably are out there, if you're in project management or logistics or supply chain, and I talked about that in the last foundational five, there's a huge global impact to logistics and

supply chain. We felt it. I'm sure you all have too. So we need to have a good system for how we're going to assess these risks that include anything from supplies to clinical impact to user experience you know to anything like that the third objective was that helped really keep us all together was to create a standardized process to prepare stage store and distribute devices and equipment prior to the go live date so this is where we kind of come down a level from get everything where it needs to go to as part of that, we need to have a process to prepare them, a process in places to stage them or store them and store them and distribute the devices. How are we going to get them where they need to go before go live, right? So we need to have that whole logistics chain that I talked

about was so critical in the last foundational five, or foundations Friday, rather, and make sure that was in place and then stick to it. And so with those objectives in mind, we need to then establish the third of the foundational five items. And that is our organization, right? A functional organization is my go to, you can have geographic ones, a mix of those, right? You have functional organizations in the US and Europe and wherever. For right? You have functional organizations in the US, in Europe, and wherever. For us, we were just working in the US on this one. So pretty standard hospital program management,

IT program management set up with the big components, and I don't have all the little boxes in the org chart that I'm gonna outline here, but overall with the sponsors, right? And these were key, the overall guidance, what's in scope, what's out of scope, what about this area or that area, and escalation points where we had issues that we needed help with them communicating, maybe we didn't get answers to certain things, or, again,

raising up those risks. And especially when risks become issues, we don't keep that to us as a secret as a PM, just because we may feel bad about it, right? We don't want to surprise the sponsors who are typically executives. And of course, for us, they were, and I'm sure for you all, they are. The second thing is they had me, project manager. My job was to facilitate team planning, communication, and logistics, right? To make all that stuff happen, but not be the one to solve all the problems, but maybe to interject here or there or to bring conversations together, maybe when it looked like

they weren't. Then, of course, we need our technical subject matter experts that are going to, you know, they're the ones that are going to make that plan, right? Our team should make the plan. What should we do to set the devices up? What's the standard we should have of, you know, how the devices work, how they connect, all those kind of things. What's the plan for now? And what's the plan to manage them in the future? So our technical subject matter experts provided guidance on technical solutions and contingencies, right? Because for me as a project manager and you all FUPMs out there or other leaders of any effort, you don't want just the sunny day plan, right? We want that pace

planning always going on in our mind, our primary or alternate or contingency or emergency. And I don't have all the contingency ideas for technical stuff. So I need the really smart technical folks to tell me if we can't do this one, what's an alternative we can do? If we can't send this, can we send these other things and on and on to a certain extent, right? Because you don't want to get paralysis by analysis and all that kind of stuff, but you need to have it played out a bit. So for me, I'm in the healthcare space. So we also needed, which are critical, our clinical subject matter experts or SMEs, as some folks like to say, SMEs. They provided the guidance on clinical impact and prioritization, right? So what we, and I'm an IT project manager, I do have a technical background, but I also do have a clinical background, but

that's not my primary gig, right? It's to facilitate these two groups working together. So I need folks that are in our clinical space now to tell me, do these devices work? Do you think they'll help facilitate better patient care, communication, all these kind of things? And what if we can't go? What if we can go? What's the clinical impact of this device works like this or this app works like that? We need to know for the nurse, the doctor, the other, you know, the therapist, the technicians,

whomever, what is the impact downstream if we make a decision in a meeting room or on Zoom with a bunch of IT folks, which is also why we didn't make decisions with just a bunch of IT folks. That's a critical thing, especially in healthcare IT. You have to have and should always have your clinical folks as partners, just part of the team all the time, not just consulted every now and then as part of your RACI chart. So we've got our leader's intent. We know what we need to do per our leadership.

We've got some good concrete smart objectives, right? Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based to get all these whole bunch of things out on time. Before I go live, we have an organization. So we know who's who, who's doing what, who to communicate with. Now, what resources do we need? Here's ones I suggest and that worked superstar team members or people, as you know, which are the most important thing. So we will have asked for the resources for the people that we will have asked for the resources for the people that we need with the subject matter expertise, or maybe you're thrown into the mix, and you've already got a team. And now for you as the PM, you just have to get used

to who's doing what already in the team, and where can you help make things better? Where don't you have to change things? Because you don't have to get in there and say, I'm the PM. And like I talked about, mark your territory and say, I got everything's got to go through me. That doesn't always make things better. And in fact, it really does make things better. So one, you got to have a good team, right? If you don't have the right resources when you are called into the effort, ask for them. The other thing which was critical is to have a near real-time status tracking tool. We use Excel and Teams, right? I like Teams. In the old school, when I was doing incident management, me and my teammates would use a spreadsheet via Dropbox, right, which you can do some real-time collaboration. Teams, of course, that was

years ago. It's much smoother, works great. We tracked, and of course, I got super nerdy with Excel with formulas and status of things and this and that. But if you're tracking what needs to go where across a building, across multiple buildings, across the entire organization, the status of the equipment, where it's going, when it's going, how it's getting there, and then you've got a nice summary table maybe on another tab that you can quickly screen grab

or copy and paste to an email, then one, you are practically planning well and facilitating success with your team in real time or near real time from the spreadsheet, because you're all going to use the same one. That's the other thing is use one, there's one source of truth. And then if you've got your summary, right, you do some table work and some formulas that's pulling numbers of this and status of that, then you can grab that to do status updates. Because as you know, with big efforts, we owe leadership updates, we owe the organization updates, and we ourselves updates, and it's easier

to grab those to filter and sort and make new tables and graphs and all that every however often. The other thing you need, of course, is the equipment, whatever kind of thing it is, if it's smart devices, chargers, those things, and then you need a means to deliver them, right? So we need the people, we need a way to track what we're doing or plan it. We need the stuff we're gonna send out. We need ways to get it places. So our leader's intent is solid. Our objectives are smart.

Our organization is functional. We have requested and we're coordinating resources. Well, we gotta communicate, right? For us, real-time messaging, I think these days, this year, last year, really shored up between Zoom and Teams and whatever other instant messenger that you use or should be using. Texts, phone calls, emails, all these different means, right?

Regular messaging is great. It's near real time. If someone's in a meeting, it can be obtrusive a little bit or they can't get back to you. Phone calls, if it's really an escalation thing or you need clarity on something you typed because again you know typed characters letters numbers have no emotion behind them right so that could cause some you know consternation in the team emails harder to track and find from a timeliness perspective if you're not sitting your computer all the time and then you also do need to have regular meetings right whether it's weekly daily stand-ups. As your volume increases,

as your risks increase, you need to contact, probably have meetings more often, right? Those daily stand-ups are pretty good. But that's what worked for us. That's what's working. I hope this is helpful. I know there's a lot of stuff going out there. And I also want to share a quote from a great leader, Vince Lombardi, who led many successful football teams and just had good leadership philosophy. And here's the quote from him. Individual commitment to a group effort, that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work, right? So if you have those superstar team members and you let them be those individual contributors that are so

committed because you've built relationships, because you've trusted them, because you've made that functional organizational strong where you could step away and you know stuff is still getting done, then for us as project managers, that is golden. That's the goal, in fact. Thank you so much for helping me reach certain goals with this podcast and who's listened and reached out and I've met people from all over the world and I appreciate your time and your effort of trying to keep up with the show or reaching out or putting in requests. I hope that you all are doing great. I hope you are staying safe out there. Wash those hands and Godspeed.