TOCICO

This presentation is about managing a 600-bed general hospital in The Netherlands on a day-to-day basis which is enough of a challenge as is. On top, in early 2008, the Maasstad Ziekenhuis hospital (www.maasstadziekenhuis.nl), turned out to have no less than 180 active projects! Active may be a bit of an overstatement, since some projects were well planned and managed; however, quite a few were unclear and often struggling or even dormant. In fact, we were facing all the well-known undesirable effects of project management: lead times of projects were long (often > 1 year); due date performance was poor (if a clear due date was defined at all); and task and project priorities were unclear. Having viewed Eli Goldratt’s webcast on critical chain project management (CCPM), Maasstad Ziekenhuis – in cooperation with TOC Resultants (www.toc-resultants.com) decided to implement project management basics and CCPM on top of that. Today, the hospital board is actively involved in selecting, planning and monitoring the execution of supra-departmental projects with the following results: the number of concurrent projects was reduced by 40%; average project lead time was reduced from > 1 year to < 8 months; and > 90 % of projects are finished on time, within scope and budget. Currently, our focus is on securing the CCPM knowledge and processes in our organization and rolling CCPM out to intra-departmental projects. This initiative should be finished by the end of 2009.