As consultants offering a wide range of healthcare planning services, we often act as project managers for our clients through our efforts working with them to create their future plans, monitor their projects or coach them through rough waters when things don’t go as expected. Over the past decade, however, project management has become something of its very own discipline, where standards and a governing body have been established to provide guidelines for the work of project managers.
Though at first Project Management Professionals (PMP) were largely focused in the IT industry, and then it spread to the construction industry, hospitals and other healthcare organizations are increasingly seeing the value of engaging formally-trained project managers to plan, facilitate, monitor, communicate, in a word – manage – their project activities. Likely due to the project-based nature of the construction industry, healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to PMPs to run their redevelopment projects.
While PMPs develop work plans and schedules and budgets and monitor the health of the project against scope, time and cost, most of the time of a project manager is spent communicating with the project team and the projects stakeholders. And most of that communication is focused on keeping everyone informed and engaged in the work. Can you get away with not having a PMP on your team for your next project? Of course you can, and many do.
Having a solid project plan in place and resources to monitor the project will remain a key to success. With large scale projects, involving multiple consultants and millions of moving parts, bringing on project managers to work with your teams increases your chances for a truly successful project. By assigning responsibility to one or more people to plan, communicate about and monitor the health of the project, your team is in a better position to anticipate and react proactively to challenges, not to mention, perform their work.
Anastasia Vogt, PMP, is a Senior Healthcare Consultant at Blue Cottage Consulting.
Tags: construction industry, healthcare systems, PMP, Project Management Professionals, redevelopment
