Be thorough
There were more than 100 issues that were identified as requiring an answer with the cancer hospital project. Gabbe knew the team needed a method to track progress on resolving each of these items.
They came up with a color-coding system that used three colors everyone knows very well: red, yellow and green.
“We found the scorecard was very helpful in defining each of the tasks we had to complete for the project,” Gabbe says. “It was something we could look at and see red if we hadn’t solved the problem, yellow if we were getting there and green if it was fixed. It was a good reminder of where we were and what we had done and what we hadn’t done. Then we expected people to be ambassadors for the project and be willing to go out and talk to their constituencies and come back with objective feedback about what we were doing.”
Once again, reaching out to others is crucial in beginning to move toward solving your problems. The team asked the CFO to go back and confirm the medical center’s and OSU’s long-range financial plan to make sure financial projections were still accurate going forward.
“We had our architects go back and begin to look at design elements of the building and how they could be structured in a different way in a setting where there were smaller patient care units, space for education, space for research and space for families,” Gabbe says.
There was an analysis of parking and how far people would have to walk from their car to specific rooms. When concern was raised about the height of one of the hospital towers and how it might impact medical helicopters, the Federal Aviation Administration was contacted.
“We said we better make sure we talk to the FAA to make sure we’re not going to need to change where our helipad is,” Gabbe says.
But it wasn’t just problems Gabbe and his team had to address. They also needed to look at ideas that might not be able to be implemented for some reason, whether it be funding or the lack of availability of resources.
“We developed what we called ‘circuit breakers,’” Gabbe says. “If our long-range plan is not as positive as we had hoped, we need to come up with a list of parts of the building that we can hold back on.”
It’s easier to come up with these things in the beginning and easier when you have to make adjustments if that possibility is already stated at the beginning of the project. So develop a list that you can refer to in the event something unexpected happens. If it doesn’t, you haven’t lost anything for the effort.
“We presented that to the board that if things are not as good as we had hoped, we will defer the construction of this part of the hospital until things are better,” Gabbe says.
The fact that all this work was supposed to be completed in 100 days was never far from Gabbe’s mind and he made sure it was never far from his team’s mind either.
“You need to create an understanding of the overall importance of the project to the company or the work group and the sense of urgency about the time that’s allowed,” Gabbe says. “Provide a sense of what the timeline is and when this work must be done.”
