Week 3 at the Royal Flying Doctor Service
What did I get myself into?!?!?
OK, so the plan was simple:
Week 1 — Work with our partners mutually agree upon a Statement of Work.
Week 2 — Perform deep dive analysis around the agreed upon SOW Problem Statement.
Week 3 — Define a solution to the challenges identified during Week 2.
Week 4 — Refine and present our solution to our partners.
Soooo, we’re in Week 3 and are still continuing our deep dive analysis. Where did we go wrong you might say? Well it’s like this. We had setup a plan to work with a single organization called the Royal Flying Doctor Service or RFDS. Sometime during day one we realized that RFDS is united by the desire to provide the absolute best service to their clients. Everyone that we met with truly believed in their mission statement of “The furthest corner. The finest care.” However, while everyone in RFDS is united behind their mission the organization is actually divided up into 6 different sections. Our project sponsor, Federation, is responsible for coordinating their activities nationally.
The reason for this structure is driven by the independence that the States and Territories have under the Australian Commonwealth Government. Due to this the different sections all have created different solutions based upon their unique needs and challenges. This means that our analysis required us to look at 7 major stakeholders. It definitely made things a lot more complex.
So, no big deal. We’ll just speak with people from each of the sections plus Federation. We interviewed five of the six sections, plus Federation who all provided us voluminous information. Now, we were also sitting in the Queensland Section headquarters so we had access to the whole team there. Finally, in order to make sure that we had good data we also performed a Design Thinking workshop over two days. The net was that we had a tremendous amount of information. Perhaps even too much information if such a thing is possible. Almost all of our interviews were complete on Thursday meaning that our week of defining and documenting a solution had yet to begin. So be it…..we’ll figure it out.
With that in mind, the next step was to collate the data. Pretty soon it all become clear. We have an organization dedicated to serving their clients. For the most part they had documented processes and were functioning well. However, their tools, data storage locations and data element definitions were all over the map both literally and figuratively. In fact, due to the differing State and Territory governmental requirements it didn’t make sense to share all of their data but rather only a defined subset that differed by user-group. This was our “Ah Ha” moment. Since one of our goals was to become more efficient in performing analysis on the data we had to determine the best way to share their data. A distributed data warehouse was the solution with each entity being able to control what data would be passed to the different sets of users. We mapped their current structure and upon review with our partners it made sense. We had buy-in which was key.
We had made progress but weren’t done yet. We had a solution for capturing and sharing the data but hadn’t yet addressed how to manage and analyze the data. For this we needed to define an operational data management system along with a common way to view and synthesize the data. In addition, the solution required a method that supported the sharing of insights and best practices across Section boundaries (another finding). We had a path forward but were running out of time.
No more weekend trips for us. It was time to go “Heads down and bums up” until we finished our project. The sprint was on. We actually have 3 deliverables: a detailed document, a summary document and an executive summary document. The goal was to write a detailed solution document and to then use that document to create the summary presentation material. It felt good knowing that we had a path forward. We divided up our activities and got to work.
No more time to blog….we’ve got work to do.
