Part I: Choose Your Teammates Wisely

If you’ve ever coached in the glamorous world of youth soccer, you know you must take the field with the team you’ve been handed. The talent pool may include future Hall-of-Famers like Sam, who runs from the ball whenever it dribbles remotely his way. Or Maryanne, who hates dirt, but wants to be with Jill, her best friend. Fortunately for you, Jill has been bending balls like Beckham since she was three.

When you are planning to implement a MEDITECH clinical system, you’ve got a leg up on the saint known as “Youth Soccer Coach.” You can select exactly who will lead the charge and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you during the good times and the bad.

In this series of articles, we guide you through the challenging process of picking the right people for your implementation. We’ll set up the situation, then the CliniSystems Insider (CI), our field-tested, incognito expert, will give you the inside information you need to navigate the minefields (and there will be minefields!) before they do irreparable damage to your project. 

Introducing the Project Team

Situation
The Project Team is not a band of heroic consultants that manages your deployment and swoops into the save the day if things go wrong. Instead, they are your employees, from your facility.

Hand-picked by you or by committee, this dedicated group learns the MEDITECH system inside and out and designs it to your organization’s requirements. After they manage the implementation, these same people will provide all administrative and technical support throughout the lifetime of your system.

Formidable challenges await your team. Often the implementation involves translating an old, inefficient application, or worse, mountains of paper documentation, into an automated solution. You will rely on this system for decades to come.

The CliniSystems Insider says:
Remember, MEDITECH employs the “train-the-trainer” approach to education. This means MEDITECH instructors do not train every person who will use your system. Instead, they work with a few pre-selected representatives from your facility, who design a training program and deliver it to users throughout your organization.

What does this mean for you? It means team members must become your organization’s subject matter experts on functionality, workflow, processes and design. Additionally, they can’t be bashful, as they must communicate frequently and effectively with your executives, as well as system users and testers.

Introducing the Project Team Leader
Your Project Team leader wears two hats: team member and project manager. In addition to learning the software and building the system, the leader organizes and motivates the team and ensures it remains laser-focused on scope and schedule. The leader sees that all deliverables meet deadlines and serves as the point person for your executives and as liaison with MEDITECH.

In Part II, we delve deeply into your team members’ full range of responsibilities.

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