You are the executive director for a growing, prosperous 8-physician medical clinic. The clinic takes patient appointments from 07:00 (start of first appointment) to 17:00 (start of last appointment) each day. There is also an urgent care aspect to the clinic. During the day, patients can walk in to the urgent care space of the clinic to see doctors about minor complaints (not major injuries). The types of minor complaints that can be seen at the urgent care space are the same as are typical of a facility like a Minute Clinic. Doctors handle the urgent care items, as needed, on a random, as-available basis, but most of the traffic is seen by a physician’s assistant (PA) during the day. The urgent care part of the clinic opens at 06:00 a.m. A second PA arrives at 15:00 and sees urgent care patients until 22:00, at which time the urgent care at the clinic also closes.
You would like to hire another 2 doctors, but the current clinic space is inadequate. To deal with the expansion, you have leased a beautiful new space in a medical office building across the street from the hospital. The new space is about 0.5 miles from your current location.
You’ve been asked to plan and manage the move to a new location. You’ve leased the larger office to open for patient care on May 1st (for the purposes of the project, pretend today is January 15th).
Since customer service is so important to the clinic’s continued success, you can’t close down operations for the move or even lessen your availability (people won’t stop getting sick on your schedule). Areas you need to account for are “connectivity” (PCs, internet, fax, phones), moving existing exam room equipment and furnishings, obtaining and installing exam room equipment and furnishing for 2 new exam rooms, public relations (stationery, customer notification), and the physical aspects (movers, floor plan, decorating), among other things.
The scenario provided is an outline only (you create many of the details), but is a situation you should be reasonably able to easily relate to. You must pick up the cues and fill in the blanks since not all the information you need is provided. You must use the methods you’ve learned to work as a team to develop a good plan of how to organize and conduct this project. I want you to think, and then apply the project management principles we are studying.
