Program Management for Improved Business Results

Appendix D. General Public Hospital

Peerasit Patanakul and Dragan Z. Milosevic

INTRODUCTION

The time is 6:30 A.M., midweek in the month of February. Julia Skown is the program manager for the Time Keeping System (TKS) Program. She is in a conference room looking at the agenda for a program review meeting to assess the status on the TKS program, which is scheduled at 8:00 A.M. In the room with her are Stacey Cook, a payroll specialist, and Tom Black, an IT project manager. They are members of the PCT and employees of General Public Hospital (GPH), and it is obvious that all three are nervous regarding the potential outcome for their program.

There is good reason for them to be nervous. The purpose of the meeting today is a program baseline review (go/kill/hold) with senior management. Go means the program is ready to proceed, kill means the program will be terminated, and hold means the program needs to be reworked and brought back for review. The team is concerned that senior management may decide that the TKS program must be put on hold. This decision will mean that the program will be sent back for rework and lose its priority for available resources. In other words, it may be put on the back burner.

PROGRAM BACKGROUND

The IT organization for GPH took the lead in championing the TKS program. Operating under the CIO, the group provides various types of services and solutions for both internal (doctors, nurses, students) and external (patients) customers. Some of those services and solutions ...