In this lecture Introduction to Project Management, we'll start off by asking a very important question. What exactly is a project? There are three things to know. A project is temporary. Meaning that it has a defined start and defined end. Projects result in a new outcome which could be a product or services. Keep in mind that the result of a project could be tangible or intangible. A project is distinct from ongoing operations. What exactly do we mean by this? Well, let's walk through a few examples. Tell me, is this a project or is it an example of ongoing operations? Imagine that your team is responsible for maintaining the Clinical Data Warehouse, CDW and integrating monthly feeds of administrative claims data from each of the health plans that your organization contracts with. Am I here explaining to you something that is a project or is this an example of ongoing operations? The answer is ongoing operations. This is something that's happening at a certain frequency. Doesn't have a defined start or a defined end. Let's go through another example. Imagine that an analytics team is responsible for generating weekly reports on readmissions that would be used by clinical and financial stakeholders in the hospital who were trying to improve quality and cut down on the penalties from particular measures that look at hospital readmissions. So, is this an example of a project or an example of ongoing operations? The answer of course is that this is another example of ongoing operations. Like the monthly example before, this particular weekly example is something that doesn't have a defined start or defined end. Examples of projects, let's get to that now. Imagine that you're a computer programmer working in a large health system, you've been assigned to a project for the next six months. The project involves incorporating voice response technology in one of the ambulatory clinics. Your role is to program the software to ensure that it's capable of handling the 200 most commonly asked questions in the clinic waiting room. The outcome will be that the voice response technology is integrated into the workflow of the clinic. As you can see, there's a defined end to this. You're working on it over the next six months. There's a particular outcome. This is distinct from ongoing operations. So, with your project, what are the criteria for success? A few things to keep in mind. Projects need to run on time. They also need to remain within budget, and you need to have a quality outcome. Those are the criteria for success in any project. Of course, there are other issues that can arise and things you should be aware of. At this particular time, take a look at the following scenario. In this particular example, we are seeing an app developer who works for a company that designs mobile health applications. He just got off the phone with a client that's requesting an app that will help patients with asthma manage their own respiratory conditions. The app developer and a few of his colleagues run into their boss and are very excited to share some good news from the client call that they just had. See if you can figure out what the term would be for what's going on in this particular project. Hey, boss [inaudible]. [inaudible]. We just got off the phone with the clients. The meeting went really well. Great. Yeah. We thought and we could integrate the new data source that they just received, but at quality. That's not within the scope of this project. Yeah, but. The project look really nicely. Yes. We have to stay within budget and stick to his timeline. It's okay boss. Yeah and it will be fun work to do. Can we just push our project away by a week or maybe a month? Leadership is expecting this team to be working on several other projects that are more high priority for much bigger clients. As you might have guessed from seeing that particular scenario, the term that can be used to explain what just took place is scope creep. Scope creep takes place whenever the defined scope of a project changes after the project has started. This could involve changes to timeline, budget, resources, agreed upon tasks. A variety of factors can lead to scope creep, including demanding clients, unrealistic expectations, but also a vaguely defined scope to begin with, lack of documentation. Perhaps there wasn't a very detailed work breakdown structure delineating what needed to be done. A lack of communication to key stakeholders can also contribute. Ensuring that all of the essential individuals are part of the project planning and certainly the project kickoff can be so important to ensure that everyone's tasks on this project and their other responsibilities is effectively communicated. So, remember in the workplace in healthcare IT, whether you're at a start-up, a large corporation, a health system, a hospital or a small clinic, scope creep is inevitable. What you want to do though is do everything you can to control as many factors to try to mitigate its effects and avoid it when possible. I'd like to wrap up this lecture with a true or false statement. Projects have to result in a tangible product. So, true or false? If you said false, that's correct. Remember, that projects can have a new outcome that is tangible or intangible. So, it doesn't necessarily have to be a new kiosk that's introduced to the hospital lobby for patients to register. It could be something intangible like a change to procedures on how you're reporting sentinel events in the ICU. A project has a defined start and a defined end. It results in a new outcome, tangible or intangible, and it is distinct from ongoing operations.