- Carlin MacKenzie
- 4 minutes read
My mom taught me all the most important things I know. Things like the importance of family, how to show up for the ones we love, and, of course, the essentials of project management.
Wait, family, love, and project management? Yes, really! Let me explain.
My family’s Christmas Catalogue Tradition was implemented when I was about five. It was simple: mom sat me down with a plate of cookies, a marker, and a catalogue and told me to circle the things I wanted. It made my mom’s shopping easier – knew exactly what I wanted, what it cost, and even what code to put on the catalogue order form!
It wasn’t long until I tried to game the system. If I simply circled everything in the catalogue, surely I’d get more presents, right?
My mother knew she had to make some changes. She didn’t know that Agile methodologies were taking the tech world by storm, or that in a few decades the same child who cheekily circled every toy in the catalogue would be using Agile frameworks while working with iterative developers for projects in the healthcare and life sciences industries; she just knew that “every toy available for mail order” was not a viable wish list!
The second iteration of the Christmas Catalogue Tradition had robust guardrails along with the cookies.
I got a blue marker, my brother got red, and we could each circle one (and only one) item per page. If we could agree on an item and promise to share it, it would be marked in purple… and that meant we could each circle another toy on that page! A week later, we’d review, crossing off the things our fickle little hearts no longer wanted, and drawing stars and exclamation points around the top three things we couldn’t live without.
From a project management perspective, this is ingenious. To help stakeholders narrow project requirements down from pie-in-the-sky wish lists down to the must-haves and the “definition of done,” I often use brainstorming and revision sessions that are not so different from my childhood Christmas Catalogue sessions. Clear requirements and communication between stakeholders make for efficient and effective projects.
I remember once trying to convince my brother to circle a dress-up set I wanted (since I’d already circled something else on that page — I don’t think he was won over by my logic). These days, I’m still looking for areas where disparate stakeholders’ needs align and overlap. How do you make sure that nurses can give their focus to their patients, and not be weighed down by endless data entry… but still meet the need for data? Without data, clinical trials cannot test a drug’s efficacy, after all, nor can products that are already on the market offer effective Patient Support Programs. Balancing conflicting stakeholder needs is always challenging, and I find myself using the same skills today that I first learned over markers and toy catalogues.
I recently helped a nurse navigator team create automated dashboards to help them keep track of their scheduled calls and tasks, and overall caseload. The dashboard helped the nurses manage their tasks more effectively, but it also ended up incentivizing data entry, resulting in a 30% increase in data quality. Before, the nurses just did data entry because they were supposed to. Afterwards, they benefited from that effort – each data point they entered made their jobs easier. The magic came from finding the spot where the data analysts’ needs and the nurses’ needs overlapped.
In the healthcare industry, the projects we handle are complex and varied. Just as my family’s Christmas Catalogue Tradition helped make hectic holiday shopping easier for my parents, strong project management helps make our projects run smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. This time of year, it’s nice to take the time to appreciate our loved ones and look back on fond memories. Mom, thank you for teaching me your values, agile problem-solving, and the fundamentals of project management. Could you teach me that cookie recipe next?