Digital PMO to enable successful partnerships and good governance
A number of challenges face organisations.
Agile working: with the ever-increasing need for integrated care system (ICS)-wide collaboration and the fundamental need for monitoring change programmes and their benefits across partner organisations, a simple, cohesive digital solution (that isn’t a spreadsheet) has become essential.
The new Normal: the exceptional strain on working practices due to Covid has also presented opportunities on how technology (such as cloud solutions) can effectively be used to deliver what had become a costly exercise of managing programmes, meetings and reporting.
Transparency: any collaborative, change, efficiency, service redesign, or productivity programmes lacking detail and background, while not accessible in real-time and anywhere, will hinder the efficient working of the group, therefore costing more to manage with questionable benefits and increased risk.
Standards: working collaboratively is difficult and working collaboratively across different legislative structures is even more challenging. Add in the lack of unified standards and ‘language’ and the result is a complex environment.
Deploying a digital solution that helps to address the challenges of agile working, the new normal, transparency and standards (ANTS) and subsequent opportunities that present themselves will enable organisations to manage risks, realise benefits and develop strong relationships with their partner organisations.
It is important to recognise the issues that currently hold back health provider organisations when developing opportunities, managing initiatives and their outcomes:
- Focus tends to be on annual planning and delivery cycles. No multi-year planning and delivery of benefits for a three- or, say, five-year period are developed. Big-ticket, system-wide projects typically take one to two years to plan-to-deliver-to-benefit.
- Ensuring that all key stakeholders are clearly identified, engaged and kept up to date with regular communication.
- Lack of succession planning causes project benefits and deliverables to leak and waste away. Individuals leave with knowledge ‘taken’ away with them. Lack of knowledge management.
- Lack of true lessons learnt and post project reviews. Non-financial risk and key performance indicators identified (during quality impact assessments) are not adequately monitored and mitigated, causing loss of benefits and increasing operational and reputational risk.
- The input and output of system-wide initiatives will in most cases either come from existing agreements or the output benefit would inevitably be an agreement. Lack of visibility and management of these assets will hinder the realisation of benefits and increase costs with risks to the services amplified across the health network.
- Ideas generated in isolation with little or no input from the operational heads, across the group organisations, who will have to deliver the benefits and live with the changes. If change management is superficial, benefits will be reversed shortly after ‘claiming’ a success. No coherent methodology of capturing ideas from operational heads and, therefore, no ownership post-delivery. Email or fragmented electronic forms are not a structured or effective method to communicate and register ideas.
- Where a project management office (PMO) exists, the focus is limited to capturing ideas and keeping spreadsheets updated. If a digital toolset is available to operational heads, they can/should maintain their own portfolio. This will enable the PMO to redirect focus to projects/benefits delivery.
- A lack of a quality standard that clarifies and ‘enshrines’ a set of procedures, roles and responsibilities of each business unit, involved in the improvement process. This results in weaker governance, infighting and silo working among key stakeholders, business units and group organisations, further promoting unhelpful conflict within the health network.
- Partnership, efficiency, collaborative, transformation programmes, cost/financial improvement and savings have become a business fact for organisations and now also across health-systems. Such a fundamental reality cannot be run and managed on spreadsheets. Nor can it be done in piecemeal fashion, where disparate practices, standards and processes, expensive, temporary or interim resources are brought in only to (in reality) help capture ideas with superficial plans, on spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. The process must be operationalised and therefore requires a structured and quality focused approach.
- Spreadsheets. Currently the majority of organisations and health-systems deliver their collaborative, change, efficiency, productivity programmes using spreadsheets, which promote the following risks.
Unsuitability of spreadsheets to meet the challenges
Spreadsheets are vulnerable to fraud and susceptible to trivial human errors. They are also difficult to troubleshoot or test. Finance and PMO expert resources must take part in necessary and lengthy reconciliations; and there is unacceptable down time of key members of team. It is not unusual for senior individuals to withdraw for a week once a month to finalise monthly reports.
They are obstructive to regulatory compliance. Audit trail facilities generally log who created the record, however it will not be easy to record the number of times the record has been amended and by whom each time. It may be unclear: who created the record; how many times the record and key fields have been modified; and who has modified the recorded changes.
Spreadsheets are unfit for agile business practices due to cut-off. Transactions relating to a subsequent month cannot be entered until the current month is finalised and this may take up to a week. Reporting intervals, and the inevitable delay in updating systems and producing reports, means having to rely on three weekly ‘forecasts’, and a monthly final position in programme reporting.
Communication of changes can only be done through emails – PMO or business units saying they sent the email and the spreadsheet controller replying email not received will be a familiar story.
They are not designed for collaborative work leading to silo working between service leads, PMO and finance department as well as across organisations.
This means service leads have little or no access to the workings, as they only receive an output and so are not able to review if a transaction has been entered correctly into spreadsheets. Finance teams are given entries by PMO to put into the ledger or reporting, or not.
Spreadsheets are also hard to consolidate; not suitable for promoting best practice, embedding transparency and governance; unsuited for business continuity; and scale poorly..
Prochainmatrix has helped its clients to address the challenge of ANTS by providing the digital solution with an integrated, supportive and structured management methodology.
Prochainmatrix provides group-wide, cloud software as a service through secure infrastructure. Our suite of modules covers the ability to capture ideas, develop these into plans, monitor delivery and have an impact on bottom line. Our suite of modules support collaboration, enabling service lines to drive improvements and efficiencies across the organisation and promote partnership with colleague organisations. By deploying our solution, tracking of initiatives and their benefits will not only be credible and transparent, but also more efficient.
More information is available online or get in contact for a chat about how our solution can help.
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