By Nancy Keane, SVP Business and Clinical Operations, Parsley Health

September 2024 – We are never satisfied! In healthcare delivery, solutions, and digital platforms, we, like the scientists in our field, are constantly seeking ways to innovate for improvement. All of us, whether at established organizations, institutions, startups, and scaleups are pivoting, stretching, and innovating every day. We strive to deliver care of the highest quality and accessibility and the best outcomes for our patients and clients. We implement improvements through new solutions, systems, workflows, service design, and processes.

Here’s the issue: managing these implementations is nobody’s day job, and it’s also everybody’s job, which means we are back to nobody’s “real” job.

In my years in healthcare leadership, here’s what I see happening repeatedly: we think the nuanced, difficult, and critical role of managing projects is appropriate to assign to anybody we sense might have bandwidth and perhaps interest. “I have an interesting project for you!” Raise your hand: have you heard this before?

We think engaging a project manager and, by that, I mean a PMI certified, experienced project manager, is too expensive. So, we scrounge around, sell, spin, encourage, energize and embolden people who already work for us in specialized roles to take on this “new opportunity for you to manage.”

No matter what their current role is, and how excellent they are in that role, they may be unqualified to manage anything but the most straightforward, conflict-free, single-threaded change.

Do I have your attention? The secret sauce to implementing innovation in our industry is… the use of professional project managers. Their most powerful lever is their desire and ability to discover, document, design, assign, kick-off, manage, launch, and close new initiatives repeatedly. This is what they do. Project managers are a professional center of excellence!

Our mistake: begging a nurse, engineer, attorney, finance leader, or marketing analyst to manage projects. This is fraught with multiple layers of risk. For example, they haven’t been trained in, and may be uncomfortable with, the use of implied authority to influence and advise people who don’t report to them. This can cause friction between groups where none existed previously.

Further, they may not be able to see around corners regarding risks and issues, contracting matters, lag, and lead times, working with outside vendors, and linking dependencies. They may not have any idea how to start and maintain a basic project plan, much less the other critical assets used in project management such as a decision tracker, project dashboards, or risk management lists. They also are not typically adept at using implied authority: the ability to hold people who don’t report to you accountable to tasks, dates, and outcomes. Making matters much worse, they have now lost focus and progress on their “day” jobs, and are on the burnout highway, express lane.

A project manager is a front facing, executive facing, fiscally responsible role where pristine written and verbal communication is a cornerstone of success. The best are adept at managing up, down, and cross functionally. They are exquisite time and change managers, bringing transparency and efficiency in our times of new technologies, increased regulations, and decreasing reimbursement.

These uniquely skilled professionals are familiar with workflows in marketing, finance, data and product engineering, legal, people, billing, and receivables, as well as sales cycles and account concerns, while freeing up true subject matter experts to stay focused. This is a key factor in project success while enabling staff to keep the business running well.

According to a recent TeamStage (a cloud-based project management solution) publication, “Project Management Statistics: Trends and Common Mistakes in 2024”:

• 70% of projects fail.
• The implementation of a management process, however, is shown to reduce the failure rate to 20% or below. This means huge financial losses, along with potential missed business opportunities and lost clients.
• 9% of every dollar is wasted due to poor performance.
• Nearly every 10 seconds, $1 million is wasted by companies worldwide because of the ineffective implementation of business strategy. This results in approximately $2 trillion a year.
• Projects are 2.5 times more successful when PM practices are implemented.

Undoubtedly, robust project management improves the chances for success and drives cost-saving and risk reduction.

In conclusion, we are not talking about hiring W-2 project managers or standing up a Project Management Organization. Try this: engage a single Project Management Professional contractor, give them 5 of your gnarliest projects, return your existing staff to the work they are great at and love (why you hired them), and watch the mastery of “getting the right stuff done well” happen for you and your teams!

About the Author

Nancy Keane loves listening, learning, and storytelling. As a Business and Clinical Operations Executive, she uses these skills to lead transformative teams that enable companies to scale. Together with those at her organizations, they maximize margins, meet market demands, have fun, and achieve operational efficiencies. She consistently increases productivity, revenue, and employee engagement. Nancy is a cross-functional, inspiring executive who excels at uniting disparate functions from the EVP level to the front line by generating trust, interest, building momentum, and creating transparent systems and processes. Whether at Fortune 500 companies, clinical centers of excellence, or early-stage start-ups, Nancy guides teams to get the right stuff done, and done well. Let’s trade stories!