You wouldn't take off in an airplane without assurance that it would safely land at your destination.
Why, then, do many health care executives continue to see valuable projects miss their intended destination due to inadequate transition planning? Call it the difference between projects that smoothly land at their arrival gate versus those that never make it there.
Organizations implementing new electronic health record systems often suffer from lowered productivity at implementation, from which it can take months to recover. Similarly, health plans implementing new enterprise claims or customer service systems routinely experience training- or testing-related quality problems.
Despite the known risks, many organizations insufficiently plan and execute transitions from the project team to the ongoing operations team. Often, they underestimate the care and attention needed to execute a smooth transition. As a result, such organizations can fall well short of achieving a project's intended business value. This can in turn result in significant costs to the organization, including degraded customer service, operational inaccuracies and inefficiencies, compliance risks, substantial remediation charges, employee dissatisfaction and potentially lost business and revenue.
It does not need to be this way. Successful organizations adopt the mindset that a project is not really "done" until the new solution successfully transitions to operations staff. That is precisely what a large health care organization did in seeking to shift a large project team to a new, steady-state operational model to support a key line of business. How we helped this organization manage this transition may provide valuable lessons for your organization and others facing similar project-to-operations transitions.
A Process for Success
Our client recognized the criticality of preparing early for the transition (and not waiting until the project was nearly complete) at both the individual and team level (i.e. the responsibilities of each functional team on the project). Ultimately, project-to-operations transitions are about people, and ensuring that the right people are in place to transfer their knowledge and/or shift into operations. With the client, we planned an appropriate transition process, identified the teams and individuals necessary to execute it, ensured sufficient resources throughout the transition, and thoroughly communicated to all involved.
The organization's leaders asked themselves these critical questions:
• Who will be doing what?
• Who will report to whom?
• When must they start to train?
• How will we know we are ready to transition?
It's a mistake for health care organizations to assume that project team members can – or want to be – slotted into operational roles, or that other individuals within the organization are available to assume the required operational roles at the end of the project. The skills of a project manager or systems configurator are quite different from those of a nurse, patient access supervisor, or a claims processor.
Rather than assuming project personnel would transition to post-project operational roles, our client's project leaders focused on defining the post-project organization structure, and the associated roles and staffing levels required to support what the project team had built. This was an extensive effort requiring input from project and operations leadership and human resources.
The health care organization's project team members needed to transition their post-project responsibilities to the assigned resources in the future operational model. In some cases, the project team members would also serve in operations, but in many other cases, this resource was a new individual within the organization. The latter was especially true for project team members who were contractors or consultants. Since these resources were temporary, they particularly needed to document their post-project responsibilities. Each transitioning team member received an individualized transition plan to help ensure the continuation of critical processes and the proper transfer of institutional knowledge.
Best Practices in Transition
Handing over processes to different teams requires careful planning, coordination, and communication between all affected groups and individuals, including partners and affiliates outside the organization. This takes time, leadership commitment and resources. Here are 10 best practices for your organization to consider:
1. Solidify leadership support. Frequently, leaders assume that significant change initiatives such as a project transition will proceed simply based on their requests, and without their direct involvement. It is crucial to have full-fledged leadership support for the entire transition effort.
2. Understand current state. Carefully inventory the processes requiring transition, including the attributes and organization of the specific project team(s) and individuals performing these processes. Also, identify current organizational redundancies, issues and opportunities.
3. Define future state. Note specific requirements for the transitioning processes, including the functional owners of specific processes as well as staffing and budgetary constraints for each functional area. This in turn defines the future-state organizational model that will meet both steady-state operational needs and support a high level of ongoing change.
4. Confirm and monitor operational metrics. Define project success based on achieving operational metrics within specific timeframes, and based on having each functional area with processes requiring transition reviewing and agreeing upon these metrics. Monitor these metrics to determine when these processes are ready to transition to the future-state operational owner/team.
5. Enlist expertise and appoint a transition leader. If you lack sufficient internal staff to adequately plan and execute a massive project-to-operations transition, engage an external firm to provide strategic and tactical assistance with the transition. This work can include defining the transition plan and approach, directing and overseeing day-to-day transition activities, assisting key leaders in transitioning to the new organizational model, and supporting leaders in defining team roles/responsibilities, organization charts, staffing plans, individual resource transition plans, and team charters.
6. Engage affected personnel. Engage affected personnel in lead roles throughout the transition process – from designing the future organizational model and associated roles and staffing levels to defining the comprehensive transition plan and approach and individual team charters. Similarly, incorporate operational planning at the outset of the process, and not wait until operations have already begun (as can happen with some transition efforts). Cross-validate team and individual roles across functional teams to ensure accountability for all functions, without role duplication.
7. Determine staffing. Based on the future state organizational model and associated operational metrics, the leadership for each functional area should define their team's roles and responsibilities and the staffing levels required to support the new organizational model and associated operational metrics. Functional and senior leaders should review and approve these plans within budgetary, resource and other constraints. Functional leaders need to identify the individuals assuming specific operational roles, as well as make any staffing changes, such as hiring permanent staff and rolling off consultants and contractors.
8. Develop team charters. Each functional area should develop (or update) individual charters to ensure clarity of each team's mission, scope of responsibilities, organization structure, roles and responsibilities, staffing, etc. This is important to ensure rightful ownership and management of transitioning processes in the future organizational model. In addition, functional leaders should identify opportunities to gain transitioning or staffing efficiencies, such as by reducing duplicative activities across functional teams.
9. Create and execute transition plans. Determine specific team and individual transition plans to migrate process ownership from the project team to the operational team. Understand the time requirements necessary for transferring knowledge, on-boarding new staff, rolling off project staff, and transitioning project team resources into operational roles. Given the near-certainty that project-focused consultants and contractors will depart, be particularly aware of the need to plan early for knowledge transfer.
10. Establish post-transition processes for documentation and evaluation. Create an easily accessible documentation site, such as via SharePoint, to catalog and inventory all of the documents needed to support the transition effort. This site, and other affiliated tools and documents, will be vital in the future for performing other, similar transitions. Additionally, identify a process for performing periodic, post-transitional organizational reviews to identify areas of potential improvement.
A Smooth Landing
Health care organization leaders should adopt the mindset that a project is not truly complete until the work transitions from the project team to the ongoing operations team. Achieving success in this transition effort requires thoughtful planning early in the project and diligent oversight and follow-up throughout the project lifecycle.
Health care organizations, including our client, that successfully plan and execute a project-to-operations transition can realize multiple business benefits, including enhanced operational staff preparedness, increased productivity, more satisfied employees and ultimately the success of their original project team's efforts. Conversely, organizations that mismanage major project transitions waste their project resources and potentially expose themselves to multiple and often enormously costly business risks.
Just as an airplane cannot take off and safely land at its intended destination without an experienced pilot and a well-defined flight plan, a project cannot truly succeed without a well-led, well-defined and well-executed operational transition plan.
Cathy Savinsky has over 25 years of senior management and program/project leadership experience. Cathy's expertise lies in leading consulting teams, project management office design and leadership, program and project management, quality assurance of system implementations, training development, project recovery, and applications design and development.
Prior to joining Freed Associates, Cathy was an Associate Vice President of Consulting Services with an IT firm where she led large system implementation initiatives and developed the organization's project management consulting practice. She spent ten years with other organizations designing software applications and managing project teams of large, complex systems integration and migration initiatives for multi-million dollar organizations.
Cathy holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from UC Davis and a Master's in Business Administration from UC Irvine.
Alan Stadelhofer joined Freed Associates in 2000.
Before joining the firm, he was an IT Systems Analyst at a large healthcare system. Alan spent time focusing on finding methods which would enhance business practices through the use of technology. He has been a project lead for the implementation of several finance related systems.
Alan has a Bachelor of Science degree in Managerial Economics from the University of California at Davis.
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