A five-hospital academic health system struggled with unmanageable workloads, shifting priorities, and a siloed operational structure that caused substantial burnout among providers, care teams, and staff. This significantly undermined the academic health system’s ability to innovate and achieve its strategic goals.
The consistent turnover among external consultants who were assisting with agile complicated matters. Furthermore, the organization faced ongoing challenges in keeping up with the Epic EHR release cycle while simultaneously prioritizing other high-value organizational initiatives. The health system needed to balance demand for growth with existing IT budget constraints and improve its competitive advantage.
Healthcare delivery organizations, particularly academic medical centers (AMCs) like this one, are a complex web of interdependent applications and processes. There is a tendency to focus narrowly on individual IT projects with formal end dates rather than on the value streams generating revenue for the organization. Too often, AMCs rely on their core EHR vendor to drive the organization’s unique business priorities instead of empowering internal operational stakeholders.
Impact Advisors' SAFe Approach
Impact Advisors was brought in to lay a framework of agile best practices at scale to ensure operational stakeholders were driving prioritization of projects instead of IT. The Impact Advisors team possessed deep expertise in SAFe and Epic and had the wisdom to know that agile transformations rarely happen overnight.
Bringing a spirit of relentless improvement, the team provided SAFe training to leadership and IT staff. The consultants coached the organization on how to align with SAFe principles to improve process efficiency and effectiveness. The result was a multi-year transformation roadmap to drive awareness and accountability across the organization.
Achieving Alignment and Transparency Across Silos
The academic health system is now aligned with the multi-year transformation strategy based on best practices for agile scaling developed by Impact Advisors. Instead of focusing on individual projects, agile teams have been realigned to specific value streams, with the highest value work being planned and prioritized for delivery. The official SAFe and health system-tailored trainings, as well as the enterprise-wide coaching, have been extremely well received. Work was defined and prioritized during the first planning interval, leading to the team’s delivery of 90% predictability. Operational stakeholders greatly appreciated the visibility of the process and a better understanding of what IT would be working on, as there was limited transparency into planning and delivery effectiveness before the engagement.
Guiding Your Journey
While SAFe offers the Implementation Roadmap as a foundation for transformations, many organizations find it challenging to convert this into actionable steps tailored to their needs. Impact Advisors brings extensive experience in navigating these changes and helping organizations develop customized plans that work for them.
Where Do You Start?
Let Impact Advisors be your trusted partner to help every step of the way. Together we will:
- Train and guide your Executive team, managers, and leaders
- Establish your multi-year transformational strategy
- Drive alignment throughout the organization
- Improve transparency, predictability, and time to value