AmeriPath - Project/Program Management
Introduction
- AmeriPath, Inc. is a leading national provider of anatomic pathology, dermatopathology, and molecular diagnostic services to physicians, hospitals, clinical laboratories and surgery centers across the U.S.
- 55 Locations nationwide, 3200 employees
- Revenue - approximately $1 billion
Situation
- Organization was developing a custom laboratory information and billing system with insufficient scope definition and project planning. A major ORACLE financial system project was also underway with inadequate resource and risk management.
- Project leaders did not know how to effectively communicate to business and technology executives the status and issues associated with the projects.
Critical Issues Addressed
- Project Management best practices needed to be learned and embraced by corporate management team.
- Business leaders needed a process to define their needs, expectations and resource availability.
- Information Technology needed to communicate on project and production resources and work load to enable business leaders to correctly assign priorities and understand related impacts.
Approach
- Project methodology that was appropriate for the organizational culture needed to be defined and embraced.
- Strong vendor relationships needed to be built to help strengthen and augment production environment and to provide skills that were needed, in the short term, to launch custom development project.
- Develop internal resources to become strong project managers and identify other skill sets that needed to be part of the organization. Insure education and knowledge transfer was provided to internal staff to insure ongoing sustainability.
- Reevaluate custom laboratory and billing system needs to adequately resource project.
Results
- CEO and CFO adopted Information Technology Steering Committee methodology to insure appropriate business priorities and resources were set.
- Custom lab system was properly scoped by sponsors and assigned business leaders with help from CIO and Information Technology management team
- Determined that “off the shelf” billing solution was a better answer than custom software development.
- Appropriate project management led a successful ORACLE financial implementation. HR and Payroll projects were also successful.
- Custom lab system and off the shelf billing system were implemented on time and within budget – served as key leverage point during the merger and acquisition efforts.
- Qualified team was identified to sustain implementation and production efforts for systems going forward.