Remove Complexity From Your Projects

This week’s tip: Reduce complexity when doing your project planning

When you have a new project, the best way to do your planning is to create a modular plan.

While modular planning is common for some types of projects, it’s a process that you should follow on transformational healthcare projects as well.

Here are the things that matter when doing modular project planning:

• Many Small Things: There are two ways of looking at any project. Viewed one way, healthcare transformations are huge. But looking at it another way, it’s a lot of little transformations that happen to individuals along the way. In some instances, a bunch of individuals transforming transforms a department. In some instances, a bunch of departments transforming transforms an entity. In some instances, a bunch of entities transforming transforms an organization.
• Repetition: Repetition is the genius of modularity. You get smarter along the way every time you repeat a process. Repetition also creates experience. A wedding cake is a great example of something that is build and created through repetition.
• Scale: Small things and repetition allow for almost infinite scaling of a project. When built with modularity in mind, large transformations can be completed with small teams. Forget about the bloat that typically comes with taking on big projects.

That’s it.

To see an example of how I build modular project plans, look at an idea that I am building around building and scaling a healthcare analytics capability for my clients.

With building an analytics capability, I wanted to build a capability that was creating value right from the get go.

So we started with building it through existing analytics processes that one department was completing using one FTE.

In less than one week, the client was already creating value from the new analytics capability as they resduced the time to complete certain reports by 30%. Then the next week that new capacity was redeployed to the next process with the same results. Through two weeks, the analytics capability had completed two major analytics processes, cut the time to complete each of them by 30%, automated them, and built documentation for future training.

So, skip the big capabilities plan that includes work streams and waves, and functional silos.

Start by building one piece of the process and you will generate value through your transformation piece by piece.

Get to value quicker. You can always complicate things later.