Sample Masters Project Management Report

Here is a sample that showcases why we are one of the world’s leading academic writing firms. This assignment was created by one of our expert academic writers and demonstrated the highest academic quality. Place your order today to achieve academic greatness.

Role of Agile Project Management in Health Care

Executive Summary

This paper discusses the article ‘Agile Development as a Change Management Approach in Healthcare Innovation Projects. The discussion involves implementing the agile scrum method in a change development project in a healthcare setting. The method was adopted for the innovative project to assist the healthcare workers assigned to care for people with intellectual disabilities.

The purpose was to study the users’ needs resulting from organizational change by introducing the agile scrum method. The article demonstrates the process’s positive results as it helped the project. However, the details of sprints and specific steps taken to study the customers’ perspectives due to the agile scrum system are missing. Lastly, the paper suggested that this process may have different consequences on large-scale projects.

Introduction

Agile Project management provides and produces value within the decided timeframe and budget. It involves the quality and valued delivery intention of the products and services rather than the risks involved during the project process. Agile project management allows an organization to break tasks into pieces to determine their importance.

It promotes collaboration between the team members. The priority of agile project management is to ensure customer satisfaction from time to time, and effective benefits are achieved as well; in agile project management, efficient planning and execution are the keys to transforming the organization effective all the members effectively respond to the changing environment (Abrahammson, Conboy & Wand, 2009).

Moreover, the Scrum model in agile project management is the initial step taken during software development. It allows one to apply the empiricism method of science to deal with complex problems and unpredictability during developing sustainable and complex products and services (Krause & Lousignan, 2010).

In this paper, the research article named ‘Agile Development as a Change Management Approach in Healthcare Innovation Projects’ written by (Baljé, Carter & Velthuijsen, 2015) will be reviewed to study the significance of the agile project management method using the scrum model in a healthcare setting (2).

In the research article, the authors suggest that agile project management software in terms of user involvement and product visibility is beneficial to use as a change management approach for healthcare innovation projects, among other success factors such as service, technology, organization, and finance STOF model, critical success factors for the healthcare innovation process such as technology, user acceptance, financing and legislation, this research article selected ‘People side of change management that focuses on the user acceptance of the results of the product during the innovation process in the healthcare setting. Also, the importance of acceptance of the innovation as a change development for the customers and its value of it in the eyes of the customers has been studied in this article (3-4).

The authors mentioned that the people side could be observed during the change management process of an innovation project. They experienced it during the project of stabling an expert system for assisting healthcare workers assigned to care for people with intellectual disabilities. Furthermore, the article mentions that the hospital’s administration involved agile software using the scrum model for the innovation project, which positively impacted the hospital’s change management process.

Also, in the article, the idea is supported by a study that customer value depends upon the collaboration process between the members involved in the innovation process of change development and the users of that process (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Moreover, the paper illustrates the benefits of agile project management during the change development process in a healthcare setting (5-7).

The article also discussed the change development model Kotter’s and change management in healthcare information technology. However, the current paper will discuss the impact of agile software using the scrum model for change management in a health care setting. Moreover, it has been reported that the agile scrum approach is the most used method in health care. It is iterative and interactive, allowing new working functionality and involving customers in the change development process (7-8).

For the project, the development method was selected by determining the novelty for all parties involved. The difficulty was analyzed to efficiently assess health care professionals involved in taking care of the project tasks and operational crisis calls on duty. The agile scrum method was adopted for handling complex tasks and methods, and the steps were designed for particular people.

Product owner position tasks were assigned to the behavioural specialist of NOVO. One of the authors was assigned to perform the scrum master role to ensure the efficient process of the development and complex approaches were examined fully. Lastly, the development team consisted of students from the University and experts in human-computer interaction.

The project’s product development was chosen to be completed in twelve sprints with specific goals for three weeks. During the project, the team members involved IT staff, and the health care workers analyzed the sprints. Also, the sprints’ complexities, advantages, and disadvantages were analyzed, and the strategies to deal with the agile process were also determined and designed.

Moreover, the scrum practices were applied and the performance was analyzed daily by the team members.

The Intelligence Monitoring System was also developed to determine the effectiveness of the project in a way that patients were suffering from mild to moderate intellectual disability were not disturbed. The IMS that involves appropriate measures for clients’ safety and concerns was applied during the project. It allowed the clients to deal with uncertain situations. Also, along with the agile scrum method, the workers found it effective and easy to control as they could get aware of the daily situations on time.

Results

• The agile scrum approach had a significant observation in the NOVO organization (13-15).
• The participants, including the customers, benefitted from the projects by showing their concerns about the project, which helped the team modify the strategies efficiently.
• The agile scrum software helped the team to stay on a vision in an organized and timely manner.
• The management made sure to provide increments and benefits to the team members during the project to ensure their availability and efforts.
• The daily demonstrations were given to the healthcare workers to increase progress and productivity and positive results were achieved.
• The effect of the system was elaborated to the team members to analyze the effectiveness of the agile scrum approach.
• The agile system helped the team to discuss the project’s insights by conducting daily meetings with the organization’s management.
• A sense of ownership was also developed in all the team members and it had positive results on the project.
• The workers controlled the system and each sprint had its advantages. It was observed that the members got involved in understanding the purpose of each sprint and that increased the efficiency of the system.
• The agile scrum system helped the members to include the requirements, work packages, and ethical guidelines of the project.
• Also, the system allows the administration to show a demonstration of the project results to the clients and customers on time which results in familiarity with the project among the clients and customers of the organization.
• Lastly, the system allows the creation of value during the project by having positive consequences on the project for the organization.

There was a problem with finances observed to show the demonstration to clients and customers. It is suggested by the authors that finances should be pertained extra to avoid such complexities that can affect the performance of the system and delay the project.

Discussion

The project’s main purpose was to choose a developmental method that brings out novelty to the organization in terms of achieving the goals of the project and serving the healthcare workers with the best of help. The research article navigates that any organization needs to select the appropriate agile software to achieve organizational development by introducing new projects.

As the healthcare unit is an important place where health workers perform tasks day and night, it is important to keep them involved in new project development easily and innovatively. Moreover, it is essential to involve every worker of the organization to understand the need for the project development so in the future, the workers may not face any difficulty adapting to the environment.

As far as this research is concerned, the authors elaborate that the operational and health workers were all engaged in the project besides team members. However, in the article, the process is not discussed with every step that does not understand the project’s results. Furthermore, in the article, the agile scrum system is discussed in terms of the project’s purpose.

The article determines that the agile software approach can be used in a change management project and have results related to climatic change, transforming the organization to adapt to the changed practices. The article mentions that agile development can be beneficial for the change development project.

However, there are certain risks involved, such as one faced by the NOVO in terms of financial issues, others involve loss of momentum and not being able to implement sustained change. In this article, the loss of momentum and unstable change risks were determined in terms of using iterations and demonstrations of the process from the initial to the last stage of the project.

This article demonstrates the real-life example of health care industries using the Scrum agile system for the change development by involving the healthcare workers. Moreover, the article illustrates that legislation, finances, and organization of the activities during the project is also essential for the effective success of innovative healthcare projects that involve scrum-based agile software system.

Furthermore, the scrum method is used as it is the most common method used in the health care industry. However, the responses of the clients and customers are not analyzed in the research article that lacks the proper understanding of their views about the project.

The article illustrates that the agile scrum method can be used as a project management tool to implement change development. Moreover, this research article illustrates the picture of one health care organization from the Netherlands, other health organizations may get failed to implement change by using the scrum agile software method as well consequences of this process may differ in other healthcare organizations of the World (15-17).

Also, this process applied for this project cannot be generalized for all the healthcare organizations as the consequences depend upon the organizational culture, workers’ familiarity with technology, innovative software implementations, workers’ collaboration, involvement, interest, and understanding of the purpose of the project (Tolf, Nyström, Tishelman, & Brommels, 2015).

Also, the organization implemented this process on a short scale project, the consequences may differ for large scale projects. Moreover, as defined in the article, there was a limitation of researcher bias as they participated in the research as well (18).

Conclusion

To conclude, it can be said that the article contributed to understanding the relationship of the scrum agile method’s impacts on change development in the healthcare organization in terms of understanding the customers’ needs and views about the project. Also, the system can be used to work with the workers involved in the project process by implementing the essential steps as defined in the article such as using stints and demonstration of practices on a daily basis.

Also, it is determined that customer involvement is important to study their needs and concerns. The results of the research indicated that the agile scrum system helped the workers and administration to deal with the complex tasks in an easy manner however, there was an issue of finances during the project.

Lastly, the article lacks the proper discussion of the steps taken for the project by using the agile scrum system, and results of the adopted process may differ in different health care organizations when workers are involved to implement large scale projects as the article discussed in the short scale project.

References

Abrahamsson, P., Conboy, K. & Wang, X. 2009, “‘Lots done, more to do’: the current state of agile systems development research”, European Journal of Information Systems, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 281-284.

Balje, J., Carter, A., & Velthuijsen, H. (2015). Agile Development as a Change Management Approach in Healthcare Innovation Projects. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance 30(8).

Krause, P. & de Lusignan, S. 2010, “Procuring interoperability at the expense of usability: a case study of UK National Programme for IT assurance process”,Studies in health technology and informatics, vol. 155, pp. 143-149.

Tolf, S., Nyström, M., & Tishelman, C., & Brommels, M. (2015). Agile, a guiding principle for health care improvement? International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance. 28. 10.1108/IJHCQA-04-2014-0044.

Frequently Asked Questions