Question

Assessing and Achieving Value

On Assessing and Achieving Value in Health Care Information Systems, select a project from your organization or past experience and expand on the Value Proposition that justifies the investment of scarce resources in this project. How would you have measured success? How would you ensure success and the achievement of the benefits anticipated by the project?

Answer 1

A business plan is a comprehensive, written description of the business of an enterprise. It is a detailed report on a company's products or services, production techniques, markets and clients, marketing strategy, human resources, organization, requirements in respect of infrastructure and supplies, financing requirements, and sources and uses of funds. The business plan describes the past and present status of a business, but its main purpose is to present the future of an enterprise. It is normally updated annually and looks ahead for a period of usually three to five years, depending on the type of business and the kind of entity. It is a crucial element in any application for funding, whether to a venture capital organization or any other investment or lending source. Therefore, it should be complete, sincere, factual, well structured and reader-friendly.

After operational needs are assessed and the concept of operations and high-level concept definition are completed, the next step and typically the first task on development projects—is to discover, elicit, collect, define, and analyze requirements. Requirements cover various aspects of a capability or system—user needs, behavioural, quality, implementation, etc.

Apply good interpersonal skills. Such skills are always an asset, but they are a necessity when eliciting requirements. When objective and open-minded and have good listening skills, their relationships with customers and other team members are productive. Their ability to effectively communicate project status and resolve issues and conflicts among stakeholders increases the likelihood of the project's success.

Collect data and documents that provide context for the project. Review data generated during enterprise and concept analysis, and review any business case and decision briefings for the project. Become familiar with historical information, organizational policies, standards, and regulations that may affect requirements and impose constraints. Gather information on previous projects, successful or not, that share characteristics with the new project. Review their system specifications and other technical documents, Find out whether there are descriptions of current operations, preferably an approved concept of operations, and any documented issues. Some of this material may identify potential stakeholder types and subject matter experts that may be needed. Draft a requirements collection plan, estimate resources needed, and consider the types of tools that would be appropriate on a project using this particular methodology. Identify potential risks that might arise during the requirements collection process (e.g., key stakeholders are unavailable due to time constraints) and plan risk mitigation strategies.

Identify and manage stakeholders. A single individual or organization often initiate a project. Inevitably the new project will affect other individuals, organizations, and systems, either directly or indirectly, thereby expanding the list of stakeholders. Stakeholders' "roles" are the executive sponsor funding the project and possibly a contributor to requirements.

Determine the root cause of the problem

Define the capability scope.

Discover and elicit requirements from all relevant sources

Document requirements' types and attributes. Categorizing and organizing many requirements can be daunting. As the process matures, requirements' attributes must be documented and kept up to date to remain traceable during testing, validation, and verification.

Prioritize requirements

Work toward getting a final agreement from contributing stakeholders

Document requirements for final approval

Capture lessons learned. When a project ends, project members, including managers, are encouraged to document their experiences, good and bad. A facilitator conducts lessons learned review with project participants (customers) to identify best practices and processes that need improvement.

Even when the requirements are good, complete, and correct, as a project is launched, changes are inevitable. Experience has shown that adding, modifying, and deleting requirements after a project is under way greatly increases the cost. A formal requirements management process will help control cost, avoid requirements creep, and ensure end-to-end traceability. However, changes do occur and flexibility is needed to manage the changes.