Strategic Business IT
Task Management
Owen’s Dental Care
1. Introduction
This report shall present a Project Plan to develop an integrated computerised system for Owen’s Dental Care, a dental business owned by the Owen family. As the IT consulting firm hired to provide services to implement such a system, a plan for systems development and project management shall be proposed to the management and owners of Owen’s Dental Care through this report.
In the administration of the several practices, the autonomy of each practice has been highly valued, as all work in treating the patients is done at the level of the local practices—typically consisting of two dentists, a hygienist, various administrators and a receptionist. Spread out across the region, each of the six practices is administered by the Managing Director but most operations are largely delegated to local administrators. Each local practice has a stand-alone personal computer (PCs) installed with standard software packages, assumed, for all intents and purposes of this paper, licensed from Microsoft, which includes various versions of Microsoft© Office (’97, 2003, and XP editions) running on different versions of Microsoft’s operating systems, including a Windows© 98 Second Edition and Windows© 2000, most however, including the head office, have been using Windows© XP.
However, during the past two years a number of problems have been identified, such as those concerning the management of supplies and monitoring the general financial status. There were cases when essential products are not to be found in one practice, while other practices have been found to be over-stocked of the same essential products. Also, each member practice has been independently sourcing suppliers for some materials they need. And it often turns out in having the same products charged at different prices for each practice. Other difficulties were also encountered resulting from diverse policies of administration across the practices, especially in terms of reconciling financial reports. Regular financial information is not at hand, consolidated overview of the entire organization is difficult to grasp and the overall performance is hard to monitor. , the Managing Director (MD) for all the practices of Owen’s Dental Care, has been having difficulty to ascertain the financial state of the business on a regular basis.
Moreover, several customers have complained that they are not able to book into different practices, especially when there are no suitable appointments available at their local practice. Cross-practice booking is not feasible.
These problems have prompted Lucille Owen to decide in investing in an integrated computerised system to standardise its practices across all the six practices. For this purpose, Owen’s Dental Care has decided to hire the services of an IT consulting firm to develop the system. However, not all the staff from the different practises are convinced of the need for this change, some of the reasons they cited for their resistance are extra costs, issues that may arise in training, and the threat of undermining the time-honoured autonomy of each of the local practices.
In this report, the foregoing issues will be addressed in the consideration of planning for an integrated computerised system for Owen’s Dental Care.
2. Project Overview
Systems have been analyzed through the integration of various tools derived from operations research, systems analysis and economics, and designed using the processes of systems engineering ( 2004). The planning and implementation of an integrated computerised system will no doubt use these tools. However, it has been previously demonstrated that a perspective focusing on requirements analysis alone is not enough to bring a project up to the expectations and standards of excellence within an organisation ( 1999). This is because the primary agents of change will be the people already working within the organisation, and all the effort of our IT consulting services will be to determine their working stem of Owen’s Dental Care and elicit from the management team their ideal work conditions that will give responsiveness and efficiency to their organisation. Moreover, the customers should also be considered in the specifications of the project, as they are the end-beneficiaries of the system change decided upon by the management of Owen’s Dental Care. A common confusion in the development of many information systems is for the Project Manager to treat owners and administrators of a company as “the client”, when in fact they do not directly experience the end result of their working system ( 1999). Therefore, to ensure that all perspectives are properly included into the plan, a soft systems methodology will be utilized to analyse the system from multiple perspectives.
C – Customers
A – Actors
T – Transformation/s
W – Weltanschauung or Worldview
O – Owners
E – Environment
The customers of all member practices of Owen’s Dental Care are its patients, looking for the nearest local practice and schedule convenient to them, and looking for low-cost services. Actors or Agents for this system are the dentists, hygienist, and especially the administrators and receptionists in every practice. The transformation process desired is for the current inefficiency to turn into enhanced productivity, to be achieved by the transformation of the company’s existing stand-alone PCs into network-capable workstations to be connected to the headquarters server, giving regular reports on its operations and schedule of its human resource availability and customer booking. Weltanschauung or worldview refers to the assumptions or frame of mind that makes these transformations meaningful. The company would like to stay competitive and profitable in the health care system within which they operate by being able to monitor the management of each member practice and control the processes it considers vital, which would lead to increased efficiency and productivity of Owen’s Dental Care. The Owen family are the owners of this Dental Care health system and overall management has likewise been assigned to a member of the family, Lucille Owen, the Managing Director. The immediate environment encountered by Owen’s Dental Care is the noticeable inefficiency in the operations across its local practices, greater integration and coordination of the practices with the company headquarters is highly valued.
Within a larger framework, the IT consulting services provided for Owen’s Dental Care represent another layer of the system, where both the Company and its customers are considered clients who will benefit to the end result of a new integrated computerised system for the Company
The goals of this systems development project are to ascertain latent organisational functional requirements of the system structures of the Company and attain behavioural consistency with its current practices. This is to provide minimal disruption in the operation of all practices of Owen’s Dental Care which might negatively affect their performance and defeat the purpose of implementing a new integrated computerised system.
The chief concerns of the owners and management team of Owen’s Dental Care are greater control on the overall performance of processes that are common to all practices by implementing standard procedures and, to ensure that these are well implemented, they need the means of monitoring such activities as supply management and financial standing. An on-line, real-time access will be suggested for each practice, this will provide exchange of information between business applications with minimum changes to existing systems and processes.
The management of overall operations is expecting the integrated systems for Owen’s Dental Care to have such desirable qualities such as ease of maintenance, availability and reliability. In addition, interoperatability and flexibility is also desirable, so that existing technologies already in use at the local practices could still be used with the new integrated system. Constraints set for this project by the owners of Owen’s Dental Care are the allocated budget of ,000 (US) for the system, and the system is expected to be in place for launch within eight weeks of starting the project. From hereon, the overall system of Owen’s Dental Care shall also be referred to as ‘the Company’ for brevity.
While the organisational structure and organisation activities of the Company has to be taken note of in the planning of the project for a new information system, another valuable aspect lies in the input from current user behaviour of employees using the current technology. This will be used to “get a picture” and analyse the existing framework and “best practices” within the Company. It will also help to identify the skills, knowledge and experience required for staff roles and responsibilities, which shall be propagated together with the new information system. Further, user input, user activity and their concerns and expectations should be fully accounted for in the systems analysis, and from these shall be identified what could be accommodated within the structure of the new system prescribed by the management. Common concern to both management and its employees, for example, will be usability (intuitive interface, easy to use) and scalability of the new system as a measure of readiness for expansion when needed.
From the perspective of the most important element in the system, its customers, a very important requirement will be ease of scheduling with a local practice. Currently, to book into a practice convenient for the customers is a very tedious process. And when schedule at one local practice is not feasible, cross-booking at another practice is likewise hard to arrange for. This has a high impact consequence to the image of Owen’s Dental Care. A unified virtual interface for customer inquiries and scheduling across all practices will be very useful to solve this kind of difficulty. This will be enabled by network connectivity and applications that will take advantage of this interconnection. Cross-linking, auto-referrals for cross-booking will be easy to monitor and there will be one interface for a receptionist at any local practice for coordinating with other receptionists at other practices.
A holistic vision is thus achieved of what Owen’s Dental Care should be like after the implementation of an integrated computerised system, and will greatly help in the formulation of a plan for the new system.
3. Project Plan
The first step in the project is the identification of the various perspectives on the system comprised of Owen’s Dental Care, its owners, administrators, employees and customers. To determine this and to get a holistic view of the system, analysis by means of soft systems methodology has been adapted for use. These efforts will be initiated by a meeting first with the owners and management team on the first two days, followed by consultations and interviews with employees and customers of the Company. The first week of the project will be allotted for this, though systems analysis may be accomplished days ahead of schedule, extra time has been allowed for in case issues arise in consultations and data-gathering.
Skills and competencies that benefit the Company shall be also identified in the context of organisational performance. These skills, once identified, shall be propagated to other employees in the implementation of the new integrated system to increase productivity and efficiency. Highly skilled employees with skills relevant to the new system to be employed will be more prepared for early adoption or pilot testing. Their early feedback will also benefit other employees as enhancements may still be applied to the system or training program. They might also help in a one-on-one peer-help once a certain level of competency has been reached.
While further analysis of the system is carried out by consulting its other participants, a rough prototype will be started to be sketched out based on the general specifications given in the first two days of meeting with the top management team, while the details are filled in as the consultations and analyses are carried out on the finer points of the system during the first week of the project. By the second week, project planning should be done and ready to finalise the systems design to be developed by the IT development team. Since what is being considered is a small network of six to eight PC nodes, a private or custom network will likely be unfavourable so a leased OR subscribed connection to the internet will be designed by using virtual local-area networks (vLAN) to connect each site to the headquarters.
Development shall begin as the final details of the system design has been decided and approved before the end of the second week. Assuming that a vLAN via public Internet is chosen to connect each site to the headquarters, an integrated software solution for malware and firewall protection shall be considered to minimise further costs to the Company in the future. Minimum requirements will be decided for the PCs to be used to enable safe network connection and optimal performance for the applications that the Company will use. The total cost for PCs will depend on the type the Company decides to use, and whether they will buy new PCs or upgrade the ones they are currently using. The price range for new PCs will be from US 0 to 0 for each member practice, while server(s) running on the headquarters (HQ), and to which every PC of each local practice will be connected to, will range from ,000 to ,500. Pricing of the licenses on software to be used and the network applications needed to run on each PC connected to the HQ will be studied and submitted to management for approval. Research and development on network applications will be conducted parallel to the initial preparation of PCs for HQ and for each practice. Total working time will be four weeks, but due to concurrent development, there will be an overlap of one week and actual time consumed will be scheduled for three weeks.
Implementation of the scheme finally decided upon shall be likewise staggered. Once development in one designated area or application is done, training modules will be developed next for the employees regarding those areas. Other members of the development team, especially those focused on network applications will continue as scheduled. While the PC team will now be ready to install and/or upgrade PCs or peripherals, as applicable, to the local practices. Staggered training for the use of PC for network applications will begin as soon as implementation is done for pilot sites. Practices with employees exceptionally skilled in tasks pertinent to the technology to be implemented will be prioritised and chosen as pilot sites for implementation. And as they get familiar through the use of the new system, their experience in these trials will be collected and analysed for feedback evaluation, so further refinement or adjustment will be implemented for the next batch of training materials. Also, it will be suggested that they might help in a one-on-one peer-help once a certain level of competency has been reached and a second round of training and implementation is in place. This will be a great help to those employees who are technically behind, while it can also be a means of reinforcing skills learned earlier by those who participated in the pilot implementation. This cycle of training, implementation, and evaluation shall be repeated until each local practice had been introduced into the new system.
Time allowance has been provided, as the need may arise, for the implementation of any additional enhancements or modification. Otherwise, when the project goes well, a soft launch or early release ahead of schedule will be a bonus to the whole Project Team.
4. Risk and Resource Management
The role of resource management and risk analysis in our project plan is to ensure that the Project Team will implement the integrated computer system within the specifications laid down by the owner and management of Owen’s Dental Care and it is accomplished on time and within the budget allotted to it (2002).
A simplified model of the Project Team across the organization of Owen’s Dental Care will be found in the Appendices.
In the first stage of the project, the organisational structure and organisation activities of the Company shall be determined from the collective knowledge of the entire management, from headquarters to all the administrators of each of the six practices. Also, input from current user behaviour shall be used to “get a picture” and analyse the existing framework and “best practices” within the Company. For these tasks to be accomplished, a series of meetings and on site visit will be scheduled. First, a preliminary meeting with the owners, the Managing Director and the six Administrators of each practice will be conducted at the company headquarters to ascertain the necessary reports and guidelines to be set by the collective management. This will be also the moment to discuss other general requirements to be set by the Company regarding the new computerised system. It will be determined what has to be maintained and what should be developed. It is assumed that an integrated financial control system will be at the core of this program, and likewise, a central human resource planner that will be integrated with customer booking into a single appointment schedule database with intuitive interface that will be easy to use for receptionists and administrators.
One risk associated with these initial encounters has already mentioned, namely, the concern of the administrators of the local practices that autonomy might be sacrificed in the implementation of a new centralised mechanism. Also, most people recruited into the Project Team will be from different working departments and local practices, and we can safely assume they are too busy responding to other people’s needs and fulfilling their “main job” for Owen’s Dental Care. As a consequence, the project team might not be able to get the administrators to cooperate even in the initial stages of requirements and systems analysis, and this early, the Project Manager and Managing Director should communicate clearly that minimal changes will be implemented in the operation of the local practices, and, that their active participation is a greatest part that can give contribute to the success of the new integrated system.
Further in the first week, additional consultations will be held with the employees, when deemed necessary in a case-to-case basis for each practice. This will be to identify skills, knowledge and experience required for staff roles and responsibilities, so that the type of learning necessary to propagate along with the use of the new computerised system will be identified and a strategy for it will be developed with the Company. These will also contribute to focused and purposeful requirements for the new system. And based on these, a draft will be regularly submitted to the management which will be either approved or refined according to their comments and specifications.
Time shall be dedicated for the scheduling of these meetings for the first week of the project. Also, other requirements will include the availability of employees for interview and consultation. It should also be noted that especially crucial are the appointments with employees to be identified for pilot training and early implementation at their local practice. The use of hardware and software currently employed by the Company at local practices may likewise be examined to make an inventory of the system historically implemented by the Company. Another area of valuable aspect is the identification of employees with advanced skills pertinent to the new technology to be implemented. This data will be used in the selection of practices for pilot testing and training purposes.
One problem that might be encountered is that user data given by employees for systems analysis may be insufficient. One suggested solution to pre-empt such circumstance from happening might be for the local administrators concerned to dedicate half of a day for this exercise in their local practice.
5. Technical and Non-technical Issues
Technical Issues
A range of technical issues may arise in the progress of the project. This section shall give some of the ones more likely to be encountered by the team.
In the development of network solutions for the system, testing the reliability and robust architecture of the connection, the development team might run into some common problems of a shared public internet. Although high-performance and affordable, the chosen service internet provider must ensure reliable connection to the headquarters for every local practice. This could be done by allowing an extra phone line used for fax to be used with a modem on standby just in case anything disrupts the connection to the network. This case of network redundancy might save the company great expense when the new integrated system is already in production.
Another possible issue is the insufficiency of training manuals or technical documentation. Again, this could be prepared for by producing drafts often and testing their ease of reference and actual use if they are actually helpful in the context they were prepared for.
Non-technical Issues
Most people recruited into the Project Team will be from different working departments and local practices, and we can safely assume they are too busy responding to other people’s needs and fulfilling their “main job” for Owen’s Dental Care. Therefore, to ensure their full participation, the Project Manager may be forced to treat them as volunteers (2002). And unlike regular employees who can be expected by the Company to do their job, volunteers must be “persuaded” to do their job. The Project Manager and the Managing Director should try to persuade their Project Team by motivating them on their importance to the Company and their vital role in bringing success to this project. And this can only be implemented in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect between the project leadership and the rest of the team.
Staff Resistance
Another related problem in the participation of administrators, staff and personnel, has been mentioned in the first part of this paper. The fear of loss of autonomy for the local practices is an overriding concern and primary cause of fear for the local practices, especially among the administrators who are largely responsible for the daily operations of each. This and the resolution that addresses this issue will be further discussed in the next section.
6. Effective Communication and Conflict Resolution
Broken details or insufficient information provided by employees to the research and development team might be resolved by effective communication and the sharing of vision to the rank and file of the organisation. Employees often work diligently and find their ways of effectively doing their daily task. When the administration of Owen’s Dental Care suddenly decides to change the processes and procedures, the employees might find themselves isolated and bypassed by these decisions. One effective way of dealing with this sentiment of alienation is by enjoining employees to join in the mission of the company where everyone concerned will benefit.
Another cause of objection and persistent source of conflict is the resistance of employees and especially that of the administrators for the several practices across the country. Fear, uncertainty and doubt are reactions frequently noted in the introduction of new systems and way of doing things. Notes of their objection is rationalised by concern on high initial cost to the company, concerns about maintenance, how will their employees whom they have relied upon and trusted on be trained or retrained as necessary to operate in the new system. Most of all, for the local practices of Owen dental Care, issues on their tradition of autonomy from the central authority of the headquarters is perceived as being threatened.
This could be addressed by the project team in having the Project Manager and Managing Director to coordinate in communicating the vision of the Company to minimise unnecessary delay, unwanted inconvenience for their existing and potential customers and preventing higher maintenance costs in non-standard use of technology ( 2001) that is not in line with the organisational infrastructure of Owen’s Dental Care. They should further communicate that minimal changes will be designed and implemented in the introduction of the new integrated system. Only the efficiency of their efforts will be changed, not necessarily the operation of the local practices. Most of all, it should be communicated to them that their active participation has a great part in the success of the new integrated computerised system.
7. Conclusion
The preparation of a project plan, and the design and implementation of information systems is definitely more than just identifying current and future hardware and software requirements for a certain company. It is an appropriation of resources and a focusing of all efforts toward the development and implementation of a working system that will help a company, like Owen’s Dental Care, to better use its potential to promote the welfare of its clients, increase its own productivity and provide a medium for greater cooperation of its employees. It is a mechanism, a process, of helping a company open its opportunity for future growth and cultivate better relations with its customers.
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