HCS 412 Week 2 Project Management Elements Example

Charter, Scope and Work Breakdown: Turning a Board's Approval Into Seven Deliverables and Thirty Work Packages for a Hospital Sleep Center

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

HCS/412: Project Management for Health Care Professionals

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital, the sleep center project and its figures are composites written for a model paper; standards and guidelines come from the sources listed.

The board of a composite 180-bed community hospital approved a six-bed sleep disorders center with one sentence in its minutes: proceed with the sleep center as presented, within a capital budget of $1.24 million. That sentence authorized spending but told no one what to build, by when or who was responsible. This paper builds the elements that turn approval into a manageable project: a charter, a scope statement, a work breakdown structure and a responsibility matrix.

The Charter

In the standard's terms, the charter is the document that authorizes the project to exist and lets the project manager commit organizational resources to it (Project Management Institute, 2021). It fits on one page.

Charter Contents

Purpose: provide local diagnostic sleep testing to reduce waits and keep care in the community. Objectives: open a six-bed laboratory and a home testing service by September 30; keep capital spending within $1.24 million; cut the wait for testing from five months to less than 28 days by the sixth month of operation; perform 1,800 studies in the first year. Sponsor: chief operating officer. Project manager: planning office. Clinical lead: medical director of sleep medicine. Milestones: design approved in month two, construction complete in month seven, staff hired in month seven, first patient in month nine. Success criteria: objectives met with no patient safety event in the first 100 studies.

The Scope Statement: Included

Renovation of six sleep rooms, a monitoring station, a patient restroom and a consultation room. Polysomnography systems and home testing devices. Integration with the electronic health record for orders and results. Recruitment and training of technologists. Policies, procedures and emergency protocols. Payer credentialing and preparation for accreditation.

Why Home Testing Is in Scope

Kapur et al. (2017), in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's clinical practice guideline, recommended that uncomplicated adults with signs and symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea may be diagnosed with either laboratory polysomnography or home sleep apnea testing using a technically adequate device, and that laboratory polysomnography be used for patients with significant cardiorespiratory disease and certain other conditions. Including home testing lets the center match each patient to the test the guideline supports, and it shortens the waiting list faster than six beds alone could.

The Scope Statement: Excluded

A pediatric program. Treatment services such as a durable medical equipment store. Dental sleep appliances. Renovation of the corridor outside the wing.

Assumptions and Constraints

Assumptions: two technologists can be recruited locally; the wing's electrical system supports the equipment; payers will credential the center within 90 days. Constraints: the outpatient clinics in the wing must remain open; infection control rules apply during construction. Writing assumptions down, and testing them early, guards against the optimism that inflates early plans (Flyvbjerg, 2014).

The Work Breakdown Structure

The work breakdown structure decomposes the total scope into deliverables and work packages (Project Management Institute, 2021). The top level is the sleep center. Seven deliverables sit below it.

Deliverables and Work Packages

1 Project management: charter, plan, status reports, closure. 2 Facility: design, permits, demolition, construction, finishes, inspection. 3 Equipment: specifications, vendor selection, purchase, installation, testing. 4 Information systems: order sets, results interface, scheduling template, security review. 5 Staffing: job descriptions, recruitment, hiring, orientation, competency validation. 6 Clinical operations: policies, emergency procedures, patient education, referral process. 7 Business readiness: payer credentialing, charge master, accreditation application, marketing to referring physicians. In all, 30 work packages, each small enough to estimate and assign.

Numbering

Each package has a number, such as 2.3 for demolition, used in the schedule, budget and status reports so everyone refers to the same work the same way. When a status report says 2.3 is late, no one has to ask what that means.

How Deep to Decompose

The team stopped breaking work down when a package could be estimated with reasonable confidence, assigned to one owner and completed in no more than about four weeks. Construction, for example, was divided into demolition, rough-in of electrical and data lines, walls and ceilings, finishes and inspection, because a single construction package lasting four months could not be tracked. Equipment installation, by contrast, stayed as one package because the vendor completes it in a week.

The Work Breakdown Structure Dictionary

Each package has a short dictionary entry describing the work, its owner, its acceptance criteria and its estimated cost. The entry for 3.5, equipment testing, reads: the biomedical engineering team verifies each polysomnography system against the manufacturer's checklist and records one complete test study per room; accepted when all six rooms pass.

Stakeholder Register

The team also recorded each stakeholder's interest, influence and preferred communication. Pulmonologists have high influence and want monthly updates; clinic managers in the wing want advance notice of noisy work; payers need credentialing documents on their own timelines.

The Responsibility Matrix

For each package, the matrix names who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. Examples: construction, 2.4, facilities manager responsible and accountable, project manager consulted, medical director informed. Policies, 6.1, medical director accountable, lead technologist responsible, nursing and risk management consulted. Credentialing, 7.1, revenue cycle director accountable, project manager informed.

Rule of One Accountable Person

Each package has exactly one accountable person. Shared accountability usually means no accountability, because each party assumes the other is watching.

Protecting Scope

Scope creep in health care projects often arrives as a reasonable clinical request made in a hallway. Any addition to scope, such as the pediatric program some physicians still want, requires a written change request reviewed for its effect on schedule, cost and risk and approved by the sponsor.

How the Elements Connect

The charter authorizes, the scope statement bounds, the work breakdown structure organizes and the matrix assigns. Next week, each work package receives durations and dependencies to form the schedule.

Conclusion

A board's approval became a project the team can manage through a one-page charter with measurable objectives, a scope statement with clear exclusions, a work breakdown structure of seven deliverables and 30 work packages and a responsibility matrix naming one accountable person for each.

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). What you should know about megaprojects and why: An overview. Project Management Journal, 45(2), 6-19. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21409

Kapur, V. K., Auckley, D. H., Chowdhuri, S., Kuhlmann, D. C., Mehra, R., Ramar, K., & Harrod, C. G. (2017). Clinical practice guideline for diagnostic testing for adult obstructive sleep apnea: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine clinical practice guideline. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 13(3), 479-504. https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.6506

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.