Curve Ball City

All successful projects have sponsors, formal or informal, and formalizing the role is best practice. This applies to traditional IT implementation projects as well as process or organizational change projects.

We ask a lot of our sponsors. The IT Governance group is chaired by a non-IT leader and all of our key hospital leaders participate. It takes a lot of work to keep the content and focus on track. As sponsors we ask them to add to their own complex lives of caring for patients and communities in an ever changing regulatory environment. We add PMOs, processes, architecture and the costs of infrastructure, support and licensing. I can tell that it can be borderline traumatic. I have the utmost respect for them and do my best to support and serve them.

Language is of the utmost importance. In IT and healthcare we live in a sea of acronym soup. DR, ADT, ICDs, TQM, EIGRP, RAC, AD, LDAP and hordes of others. As IT leaders the burden is on us to learn the business, jargon and culture of healthcare while not burdening our business partners with the arcane (yet exciting) nuances of technology.

Technology projects are occasionally sponsored by members of the IT leadership and so I just celebrated my first anniversary as the sponsor for a huge forklift upgrade to our clinical application suite. We're scheduled to complete 3rd quarter of next year and while this challenge is not the same sponsorship required to rip out a ADT/billing system I'm starting to get a feel for what we put our business executives through.

It's been curve ball city or perhaps more like standing at the plate looking at Jamie Moyer wondering what in the heck is he gonna show you next. He winds up, the pitch comes flying down the plate breaking low and inside [scope doubles before the charter is signed], swing and a miss. He winds up again for the 0 and 1 pitch and lets fly, 89 miles of fastball, swing, get a piece of it and foul it off behind 1st base [ehr project schedule change delaying start project due to resource collisions]. Now the 0 and 2 pitch, a high arching curve ball, but it's high so hold the bat [vendor overcomes issues getting resources to the table]. I have no idea what the next one will be but I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Our hospital sponsors are mostly like a bunch of lead-off or designated hitters. I just hope I can knock a base hit in for the team.