Case Study: Oregon Health Science University
The matters OHSU is involved in are a matter of life and death. In health care, resources and their projects, technical updates, and issues must be managed without error. OHSU is Oregon’s top-ranked hospital for a reason—they’re constantly looking for ways to improve, make discoveries that save lives, and train leaders in the health community. Advisicon helped the state’s only academic health center work faster and smarter with increased visibility into their important initiatives. The Microsoft solutions we prescribed allow the foundation full transparency with all the necessary parties, ensuring an accurate view of situations. It’s no joke—a centralized dashboard can and has saved lives. Advisicon is proud to have a hand in this vastly improved medical system.
Business Situation
OHSU needed to improve its project management processes, not just for bettering its general project management organization, but also for utilizing nurses and doctors in project delivery. Their key need was for resource capacity visibility into their busy workload while not forcing an overly complex technical business solution on staff unacquainted with project, program & portfolio management methodology. Importantly, their solution needed to scale across multiple years (10+) while still providing low overhead to manage and report on.
Solution Delivered
Advisicon helped identify core business requirements and cultural maturity when utilizing scheduling software that fed dashboards, reports, and key metrics that senior leadership used to validate and justify their budgets and results. We helped implement Project Server and SharePoint, along with some light PMI project management training for their staff. This solution worked across multiple generations, eventually being migrated to Office 365 and ultimately being consumed within tracking views and deliverables that aligned with their existing financial accounting systems.
Benefits Realized
By approaching OHSU’s team without pre-set methodology and technology solutions, OHSU was able to grow their project maturity, reporting tools, processes, and dashboards, without creating undue work on non-project SMEs (subject matter experts), and create an agile environment that provided better, more adaptable tracking, reporting, and budget forecasting for strategic and tactical initiatives.
The Organization Today
Recently, OHSU has taken on several new initiatives. With the COVID global pandemic, they moved quickly to exponentially expand their telemedicine program, performing 13,000 digital health visits in March 2020. Without project management procedures in place, this expansion wouldn’t have happened as smoothly. Additionally, as an academic health center, they take pride in being a community leader and a good neighbor—they’ve committed to becoming an anti-racist institution and continue to address gun violence as a public health issue.
