You are the Program Manager for a consulting company hired to improve a system for flying patients and/or transplant organs to appropriate hospital destinations. Patients may be those located in remote areas where major hospitals are not nearby, or they maybe emergency patients who just need to get to a different hospital with specialized equipment. As for transplant organs, when a match is made by UNOS, there is usually a very limited time window for getting the organ to the hospital where the patient is waiting.
As you may guess, this is important work which is usually time critical. LifeWings Air was established usingfederal grant funds to help provide medical air transport and help lower medical costs when possible through the use of VOLUNTEER pilots. Certified pilots donate their time and aircraft to do this work. Approved hospitals and clinics make requests for transport, and area pilots are contacted so they can accept the flights. So far, this has all been done via phone calls between UNOS, hospitals, LifeWings staff and the pilots. When there is no available volunteer, the requestor must instead contact an expensive commercial air service. Given the tight time frames for certain situations, the “phone chain” does not have much time to work before the
commercial service backup has to be called in.
As the Program manager, you have set up two related projects to try and automate and improve the LifeWings systems. One project is to develop the “pilot side” of the system to recruit and assign pilots and planes when there is a transport need. The second project requires integration with a number of established, complex systems used by hospitals and UNOS to accept requests for transportation. The interfaces between them are subject to a number of oversight boards and governmental agencies. You want to use traditional methods on this part of the project because it will allow you to do the kind of progress reporting that the oversight agencies require. Since this is being done with grant funds, and large organizational systems are involved, formal scope
and risk management is expected.
The project is well into coding and is a bit behind schedule. Your best DBA has been complaining and doesn’t seem happy on the job. Your primary hospital partner has diverted some of its IT staff to some new priorities related to Covid. There has been some confusion and delays related to some of your server equipment, but the vendor says it will get everything straightened out in time as long as the chips can be unloaded at the ports soon.
Suddenly there is a new requirement. The CDC now requires medical providers to collect pilot vaccinationstatus and health status, along with contact trace data after each flight, just in case. So now the medical side has a new interface to the CDC, and a need to get additional data from the pilot side.
Instruction: Describe through a memorandum to your supervisor how the project will handle the change in scope and risk.
1) Prepare a risk register for the things you need to watch or prepare for. Include the type of strategy
(avoid, mitigate, etc.), the actions to take and their triggers.
2) Explain what you believe will be an effective change request process that will involve all major
stakeholders and adhere to various grant reporting requirements (How you will handle the specific scopechanges you see in this case) Include any documentation needed to initiate a potential scope change.
Depth of Thought will be based on how clearly you convey your understanding of how to handle scope
changes and risk events and how well you APPLY these concepts to the details of the Lifewings Air case
Tools and techniques will be based on using terms, models, forms and/or tools for managing scope and risk.
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