Page 86 - DMGT521_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Unit 5: Functions of a Project Manager

Notes
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Case Study What a Heart Surgeon could Learn from
a Project Manager?

riving into work one morning, I was listening to surgeon and author Atul
Gawande talk about a study he’s done at the Harvard Medical School. I found the
DNPR story titled, Atul Gawande’s ‘Checklist’ for Surgery Success, interesting - I
think you will too.
“Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty,”
Gawande says. “It’s also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in
your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.”

Because doctors are human (just like everyone else), they sometimes miss things. So
Gawande looked at other fields that deal with complex circumstances and visited, among
others, Boeing to see how they make things work. He cites the “pilot’s checklist” as a good
example of how other complex tasks are completed outside of medicine.
Unlike a pilot, there is no checklist in surgery, just the surgeon’s experience and intuition
that dictates how a procedure is performed. So as an experiment, he brought a two-minute
checklist into the operating room of eight hospitals – after having worked with a team of
folks that included Boeing to show them how to put the checklist together.
How did it work?
“We get better results,” says Gawande. “Massively better results.”

“We caught basic mistakes and some of the stupid stuff,” Gawande reports. “We also
found that good teamwork required certain things that we missed very frequently.”
Something as simple as making sure that everyone in the operating room knew each
other by name turned out to be incredibly valuable. Isn’t it interesting how similar some
of these issues sound to the work management issues project teams face every day?
Not unlike some project managers I have met, many of the surgeons weren’t originally
too keen on operating with a checklist. However, when all was said and done, 80% of the
surgeons saw the value of the checklist. And, although 20% said they didn’t need the
checklist, 94% said that if they were going to have surgery they would want their surgeon
to be using a checklist.

I realise that heart surgery and project based work don’t have a lot in common. That said,
the surgeon could learn a few things from project managers about how to create a sound
work management (surgery management) methodology. Project managers could also
learn from this study. “We caught basic mistakes and some of the stupid stuff,” Gawande
reports. “We also found that good teamwork required certain things that we missed very
frequently.”
Despite all the evidence, Gawande wasn’t sure that using a checklist would help save the
lives of his patients-after all, he was from Harvard. However he started using the checklist
and says, “I was in that 20%. I haven’t gotten through a week of surgery where the checklist
has not caught a problem.”
Like surgery, capturing best practices and formalising processes are critical for success.
Like the surgeon’s checklist, the right project management tools can help. Fortunately,
Contd...

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