Editorial
Projects provide exacting structure for focus on the future
March 21, 2003
Susan Wendt, administrator at OMNI’s Forest Hill, said earlier this week that new projects have to be introduced slowly to be successful. It was in an exemplary manner that Forest Hill recently installed the Tena system. Looking forward to the time when the multidose is scheduled to start up at her home she’s clear that there are competing priorities to manage. She tells us that she wants to complete work with the accreditation process before she leads the home through the multi-dose implementation.

Susan’s take on managing timelines carefully, and having the benefit of bringing new projects into the home after others have piloted them adds up to a commentary on how to bring about change in a manner disciplined for success. The Forest Hill example is similar to the experience of other homes, and in all cases there can be a distinction made between new initiatives and operations.

In the last six to eight months OMNI home office has been piloting a new initiative of their own, the use of a project model as a way to categorize and discipline the change process.

Susan has perhaps put into words, and made overt, the very process that OMNI’s head office has employed to test the projects model itself as a mechanism for managing change.

It has been months since members of the home office team first began researching the use of projects as a way to distinguish change initiatives from operations. That distinction is already proving to be useful.

Competing priorities can be understood to fall into two categories, the things we have to keep on doing well to serve our residents, and the new things we are trying in order to serve them better. As illustrated by the Forest Hill example, accreditation, the third party review of OMNI’s care performance, has long been a staple of the OMNI evaluation process. The incontinence and multidose systems are both new initiatives.

The ability to place activities in one of these two categories will help homes stay conceptually clear about the balance between efforts that keep homes stable and efforts to successfully introduce improvements. That clarity can contain the sense that there is too much change, and put everything into an enabling perspective.

It is with clarity in mind that the home office has structured its activities along these lines. There are two key operations contacts now, Shawn Riel and Candace Yeo. Each has geographical and functional responsibilities, defined in such a way as to discipline, and make more effective, the way in which OMNI keeps its eye on operations.

With that work done, a newly formed projects committee piloted the use of projects as a mechanism for managing change. Tena, multidose, and the Mission, Vision Values campaign were OMNI’s first forays into the use of projects.

Home office has recently defined a project as:

A unique and temporary endeavour with a definite beginning and end and defined outcomes. Systems and procedures identified through the development of the project will become part of the day-to-day provision of care and/or services.

The work of piloting the project model, defining project parameters, and choosing projects and people to lead them have all been activities of the projects committee, lead by Fraser Wilson, OMNI’s CEO.

This week Fraser returned home, so to speak, from his work at the OLTCA. He will now be able to turn his full-time attention to OMNI’s future. The project committee and its emerging terms of reference provides an exacting structure for a focus on the future. Developed and matured it can also ensure change is introduced in a well-tempered way.

New and potential projects are emerging from OMNI’s homes as well. Mary Lynn Lester, Carol Parnell, Barb Payne, Linda Pierce, Gary Sims, and Susan White have all signalled their top of mind priorities. Some of them reflect similarities, others have very distinct initiatives in mind.

Making the most of the maturation of current change initiatives, the increasing clarity between those and operations efforts, the potential of the projects committee, and the new found time in Fraser’ schedule can be straight-forward. All that is necessary is to apply the project framework to the new priorities and opportunities voiced by these and other OMNI leaders.

Viewing their thoughts in light of the new initiatives versus operations split provides a glimpse of what new projects might bubble their way to the top of the list. The projects committee should keep an eye on these initiatives and apply the context of the Mission, Vision, Values, and the quietly simmering Signatures, to assess which of these potential initiatives to throw extra weight behind.

Doing so would catalyse the synergies between the emerging initiatives in the field with the focus afforded by the framework OMNI represents as a whole.

Prepared by: Peter Pula, Executive Editor, OMNIway News

E-mail: peter@newsroom5.com