Change Management & Healthcare IT Project

As a Project Manager in a healthcare IT project before, I worked with the project team comprising of  Business Analyst, Security consultant, Enterprise Architecture consultant, Standards consultant, Solution architect, a doctor and a nursing lead to establish the functional and non-functional requirements.

When I got involved, the clinically trained team have gathered the functional requirements from the private General Practitioners (GPs). However there were constant changes to the requirements and the project scope wasn't clear and evolving as well.

Hence I first established a change management or change control process (what-is-change-control?) which included regular and ad-hoc managment and project meetings to align and clarify the dynamic changes circling around the inter-dependent areas which were also evolving as well.

However I soon realized that in this particular project, change management from the organization management perspective meant the use of the following strategies to increase user adoption rate.

1. benefits realization- defining the qualitative & quantitative benefits as well as how & when the benefits are measured & implemented
2. business process re-engineering- stating the "as-is" state of the business process & defining the "to-be" state
3. education- e.g. seminars, workshops or web-minars that "sell" the benefits of the new proposed system
4. communication- e.g. e-newsletters, web platform, personal visits to inform the progress of the project as well as the migration approach of the data & the "to-be" business processes
5. training- e.g. classroom training as well as on-site refresher training during deployment

Detail change management activities that evolved from the above 5 strategies were factored into the project schedule.
The change management in this project was undertaken by a change management lead role and its aim was to ensure a smooth transition of the new system as well as a structured and well planned strategy to ensure increased user adoption.

Change management could mean the use of various strategies to "win" user over to increase user adoption as well as what is commonly used in the project domain which refers to the process of monitoring and controlling change- aka change control.