by Bill Damaré

The Department of Defense and private sector have reaped the benefits of standardizing project management tools and techniques for many years. Improvements in the way projects are estimated, scheduled, monitored, and completed have dramatically improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Large sums of taxpayer money are invested in complex projects, so federal, state, and local government agencies have begun to take a keen interest in institutionalizing standard project management practices. When these practices are not institutionalized, inconsistencies and variations in project manager and staff knowledge, skill, and experience can lead to mismanaged, overbudget, and, ultimately, failed projects.

Instituting new rigor and formality in project management is rarely associated with improved morale and job satisfaction. In reality, implementing a comprehensive project improvement initiative results in multiple benefits—from improved communications and less risk to better value for the dollar spent—especially when an organization can strategically integrate project management principles and practices across the entire enterprise.

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH), which serves about 10 million residents in California, is the largest mental health system in the United States. It has faced a tremendous increase in demand and workload over the last few years due to program growth following the passage of the Mental Health Services Act. This growth prompted the department to embark on an integrated, strategic approach to maturing its information technology (IT) project management capabilities, which now serves as a model for other LosAngeles County departments and agencies.

Speaking the Same Language

When managers look to improve their project management team, too often, they simply look at the skills and experience of individual project managers without much consideration for the extended team members’ involvement in developing a project’s charter, work plan, or acquisition strategy. They attempt to close skill and knowledge gaps by sending individual project managers to training delivered by various sources that advocate a variety of methods, tools, and techniques. Inconsistent or isolated training events usually fail in the end because a project management team is only as strong as its weakest link.

A new trend in projectmanagement training takes into account the entire project responsibility life cycle (Figure 1), including team members from the business analysis and acquisition communities. This approach recognizes that business analysts, project managers, and contract managers (procurement) work on a project continuously, yet they are engaged in various capacities and at various intensities during the course of a project. Along with the customer (the end user, who has a stake in the ultimate success of the project), the project team needs to have an understanding of how their roles and responsibilities overlap and fit into the larger picture.

New integrated training techniques and programs focus on blending skills across the project team. Integrated approaches ensure adequate multidisciplinary training to perform consistent and effective project execution. IT project managers, for example, understand their part of the project management life cycle and the details of IT. However, the transition from gathering requirements to setting up the actual project team and developing the project plan often doesn’t happen smoothly. Business owners often communicate their wants and needs from their perspective without a full understanding of the impact the project may have on other projects or the enterprise. The IT project manager usually has a broader perspective of the organization’s infrastructure and the potential impact for change. In the requirements analysis phase, the project manager must learn how to ask questions that elicit the business owner’s desired project outcomes.

Defining requirements to build a project plan is the cornerstone of any successful project. Unfortunately, many project managers don’t have the business analysis training or background to understand how to gather, document, and validate user requirements. Most important, many do not know how to define a project around what is achievable to meet those requirements. Therefore, a comprehensive project management training initiative should include a heavy emphasis on the front end—business analysis and defining requirements.

Integrated training should focus on aligning the project team’s work by adopting the following principles.

• Create a Synchronized Project Management Team
  Project managers, business analysts, and contract managers often work in silos—each handling one piece of the project management pie. This disjointed approach flies in the face of how a well-run project should be executed, adding a new definition to the triple constraint. Each element of project scope, time, and cost builds upon the other, and any missteps lead to problems later on. The analyst must verify the user requirements. The project manager must build a work plan, set up the project organization, and define the tasks in as much detail as possible. From an accurate plan, contract management can create a solicitation that includes specific milestones taken from the project’s work plan to measure vendor performance and outcomes. Today, a comprehensive training program must ensure that the team works in alignment and, most important, can even perform aspects of each other’s job function.
• Train Simultaneously
  Project management training works best when classes comprise staff members from all three areas—business analysis, project management, and contract management. Simultaneous training helps teams develop a common understanding of methods and each other’s responsibilities to ensure cohesiveness and collaboration. Communication within physical and virtual project teams improves significantly. DMH applied this new trend in project management training when, in November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 63, now known as the Mental Health Services Act.

New Legislation Prompts Training, Restructuring

The historic Mental Health Services Act levied a 1 percent tax on individuals with personal incomes exceeding $1 million to be directed to new mental health programs in the state of California. This “millionaire tax, ” which was projected to generate nearly $600 million in fiscal years 2004–06, affected a number of organizations throughout the Golden State. But few were as affected as the Los Angeles County DMH.

In the wake of theMental Health ServicesAct, DMH found itself suddenly inundated with requests for new IT projects and services. Dealing with unprecedented demand, and about a 30 percent increase in workload, DMH’s chief information officer, Dr. Robert Greenless, realized that his staff needed more formal training and consistent methods for project success. He was also faced with transforming his IT enterprise from one with roots in a mainframe world to one organized around the PC and Internet.

After an extensive search, DMH engaged ESI International to develop a training roadmap for its IT organization that would allow the teams to more effectively execute a series of IT projects, including a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

“We had an increased workload, but had a staffing shortage of 54 people. So, we had a clear vision of how effective project management training could be valuable to help us face each new challenge in a consistent way without having to reinvent the wheel each time, ” says Greenless. He points out that his team didn’t share the same experience, training, and vocabulary in project management and business analysis. Even specification documents, for example, would vary on the basis of who wrote them. “We needed a common system, a common set of methods and a common language. ”

In concert with Greenless and Sharon Carlson, associate chief information officer, ESI developed a training road map for DMH to ensure an integrated training curriculum—not just disparate courses. DMH required training content that combined aspects of business analysis with globally recognized, standard project management knowledge consistent with the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. An important factor in the selection of ESI was the final exam administered at the conclusion of each class. “It served as an important measure of learning and challenged participants to be fully engaged in the learning process” remarks Ms. Carlson.

An added bonus of the program was that staff members received recognition and documented credentials when completing the entire curriculum, including a formal certificate from ESI and ESI’s academic partner, The GeorgeWashington University.

Building a Training Roadmap

Since 2005, three cohorts of DMH employees and managers from the Chief Information Office Bureau have followed a consistent, methodical business analysis and project management training program. According to Carlson, this was a wise decision. “Managers who went through training were able to more effectively pair employees to projects that aligned with their new skill sets. ”

In addition, a number of DMH executives and managers from non-IT business units completed theManaging IT Projects course. This helped facilitate and promote a better understanding of the processes involved in many of the department’s projects.

ESI’s courses had to be taken in a specific order and were designed to build upon each other for maximum effectiveness. The first set of four courses (Introduction to BusinessAnalysis, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, Managing IT Projects, and Process Modeling Management) purposely focuses on business analysis and the role of the project manager during the requirements gathering phase.

For example, the Process Modeling Management course aims to teach team members how to perform the business analyst’s role and responsibilities in defining requirements during the planning phase of a project. By having both project managers and business analysts attend the same course, the business analyst can work in concert with the project manager to ensure that newly implemented processes enhance the success of a project and increase the project’s ability to meet the organization’s business goals. The project team further focuses on competencies necessary to perform workflow modeling to ensure processes can be documented, benchmarked, and measured.

One course, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, is particularly helpful in providing tools and techniques to better elicit and manage requirements. Communication breakdown often happens at the onset of a project because business analysts and project managers often lack the training and communications skills to collect the right information from end users to define requirements.

“Before training, our analysts didn’t have a common approach to eliciting useful information from those they interviewed and often lacked the confidence to take control and really engage the end users, ” says Mark Cheng, Manager/Enterprise Project Management and Planning Division, noting that frequently, “Meetings with end users would often go around in circles producing very little in terms of useful requirements and workflow definition. ”

By learning successful facilitation techniques, business analysts and project managers can effectively help stakeholders define their needs, form these needs into documented requirements, motivate group participation, build consensus, manage conflict, and maintain session focus. After completing the final three courses, Facilitation Techniques for Requirements Development, IT Risk Management, and Scheduling and Cost Control, team members were awarded a Master’s Certificate in Project Management fromThe GeorgeWashington University’s School of Business.

Training Put into Action

Los Angeles County’s DMH quickly put its training to the test when it embarked on a series of projects, including a medical professional credentialing system, meant to lead to the ultimate goal—an EHR system. “We took ESI’s methodology of examining our ‘as is’ situation relative to our ‘to be’ situation when assessing our EHR system. We quickly recognized that there was an enormous gap between what we had in place and what we needed to do in order to support data integration between counties and across agencies, ” says Greenless.

DMH not only provides mental health services to its clients, but also acts as a mental health plan administrator, contracting with Medicaid providers to deliver services. The State of California Department ofMental Health has a vision to allow the safe and secure sharing of client medical information across multiple counties in California— no matter where a client is seen, the clinician could access their record and see the entire medical history.

Seen as one of the first steps in this ambitious EHR agenda, according to Greenless, “the credentialing project has become a textbook case of good project management. ” The project became a priority when DMH decided it needed to improve, simplify, and better coordinate its process for validating the licensure and training for physicians and other licensed professionals, including psychologists, registered nurses, and other health care providers in preparation for the EHR system.

“We certainly couldn’t do the credentialing manually anymore, ” said Greenless. “We decided to automate the credentialing and purchase a system that could be integrated with and feed into the eventual EHR system. ”

Following an IT projectmanagement method reinforced through ESI training, the assigned team embarked on documenting requirements and procuring a new credentialing system. The first step was the project initiation phase, where the project was officially requested and a business case was built around the credentialing system (Figure 2).

In the second phase, project planning, DMH analysts met with five separate business areas that already performed credentialing and assembled requirements, and then worked successfully with the project manager to define one overarching process that could meet everyone’s needs, along with developing the work breakdown structure, budget estimate, and resource plan.

As the project developed, the DMH team moved into the project control phase, managing processes to make sure the actual project performance aligned with planned performance. The project is now moving into project execution, where the system is implemented and tested. This will be followed by the project closeout phase.

“Our training provided a clear starting point on how to elicit requirements, then how to staff and build a project plan and clearly define who does what. Considering we were severely understaffed at the start of the project, so far, we have kept it on schedule and within budget, ” notes Greenless.

This is all the more notable since DMH’s IT department is the first one to concede that its project management success rate had previously been “uneven, ” noting some false starts and projects that went unfinished.

Training Roadmap Becomes Model for County

In 2006, DMH prepared a 2007–08 business automation plan for the Los Angeles County Chief Information Office. Greenless points out that the Chief Information Office noticed how productive it had been, despite severe staffing shortages, in addressing the challenges of the Mental Health Services Act. This prompted the office to look more closely at DMH’s training program, along with other public-sector models across federal, state, and local government, to create a county-wide, consistent training “road map. ”

Sanmay Mukhopadhyay, associate chief information officer, created a Project Management Office advisory committee with representation from several large LosAngeles County departments, including DMH. Taking the best ideas from several programs, the Chief Information Office selected a series of seven IT project management courses, concluding with a county-specific IT orientation class, and established the LosAngeles County IT project management certificate track (see Figure 3).

Training Fosters Teamwork

The ESI training, by its very nature, is designed around class exercises and requires collaboration during the course. By training together, the project teams rely on each other to get the job done. “After training, I can certainly say that confidence andmorale shot up. When I walk around the work areas, I frequently see ESI manuals on desks used as reference. If people are stuck with their project management or business analysis tasks, they quickly refer to their manuals or engage their colleagues for help, ” says Cheng.

DMH currently has no plans to slow its training initiative, and many of the bureau’s planned new hires over the next year will be taking courses. “We now have a formal process to follow, logical steps to take, and training that allows our staff to practice what they learn through exercises that mirror real-world situations. Now, when a project comes along, no one is scratching their heads and stymied about how to take the project to the next stage. Training has obviously eliminated many fears, ” says Cheng.