Imagine one voluntary stay 400 bed residential program. The requirements and standards for this program are quite minimal; a bed, a space for clothing and the ability to provide three meals without minimal nutritional requirements. This Program looses roughly 500,000 dollars a year when operating by itself. Now imagine an additional program; 250 bed non-voluntary residential program with a two 400 page statements of requirements (from two different accrediting sources)covering everything from the candle light measure of the room lighting, to month long menus for food service meeting federal requirements for nutrition, serving size, and caloric intake. This Program grosses over 8,000,000 a year, and who’s profits and existence subsidizes the initial Program. Got that? OK, now lets plan to physically move both of these programs into a new shared building. With only 30 days of notice of when the actual move date is.
When deciding who would be the Project Manager for the move, from which Program would you think the Manger be chosen? The second group, with the more stringent requirements and whose existence maintains the financial standing of both programs? Nope, the Project Manager was chosen from the initial program. Was this due to experience in Projects of this type? No, this decision was made based on that persons familiarity with the powers that oversaw the entire project.
OK, there is the background information. Now for the fun stuff. The Programs cannot move separately. Movers were hired for August 1 to ensure that the Program move would be completed by August 3. The movers contract was signed July 2. On June 10 we were informed that the accrediting auditors would not be able to visit the new Center and sign off on its occupancy until July 15. Without this sign off, the second (profitable) Program will not be able to move. The auditors will not be able to return to do a re-check for occupancy until September 1. So why would the movers be contracted prior to approval for the move in?
Two major Project management blunders took place in this true life scenario. One, there was a bad choice made in regards of who was in charge of the Program. There was, from the beginning, an issue with which Program would be made a priority. This was, however, a fixable problem. With good communication between the Project Manager and the heads of the second program, many issues could have been eliminated.
The second misstep was in not creating a functional scheduling matrix. This led to the decision of hiring the movers to be based upon financial reasons (the earlier the movers were scheduled, the less expensive they were) rather than on scheduling reasons (impossible to move in until the auditors signed off). In actuality, the costs of having to reschedule the move was more expensive that what a delay in signing the contracts for the move. The non-quantitative costs of having all of the residents prepared for a move and then two weeks prior having to tell them that the move would be postponed is somewhat immeasurable at this time. This loss of goodwill and trust also extends to the staff members who had to change their routines and then place them on hold. While I may never be a part of such a massive project again, I will take away from this one the need to have an effective scheduling matrix
I would wonder how from this point things progressed? Was an inflight communication matrix established? Did the project successfully occur or did the lack of audit ability put the whole thing in the ‘hold pattern’? I would certianly hope that even with the higher costs being brought into consideration the project was able to be completed successfully (after the audit and the movers stepped in of course. I wonder further if the audit itself could have been flexed to bring in another ‘audit team’ or outside consultant expert, maybe at a higher cost, but at least less than resigning the moving companies contract. There could have been a hail Mary play to be made in there somewhere. Just and outsider speculating here 🙂