The podcast by project managers for project managers. A project story about a massive initiative focused on an EPIC implementation at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Hear why this project to streamline patient information, enhance care, and improve operations has the tagline "Best Implementation of all time."

Table of Contents

04:29 … University Hospitals of Cleveland05:11 … The EPIC Integration07:18 … The Size of the Initiative09:51 … The Cost11:21 … Convey Calmness and the Right Mindset14:47 … The Guiding Principles18:38 … “Best implementation of all time.”21:48 … Kevin and Kyle23:17 … Risk Management28:09 … Time to Pivot31:31 … Big Bang Go Lives32:41 … Project Team Selection34:23 … Enterprise Program Management Office Perspective35:54 … PMO Resources38:15 … Takeaways from the Project42:56 … Find out More44:03 … Update44:36 … Closing

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer, our sound guy.  Thank you so much for joining us today. 

We have three guests, which is something new for us, and we’re quite excited to have a really full house on the Zoom studio today.  Our first guest is Sami Othman.  He is an operations and IT leader who designs and executes breakthrough IT solutions that optimize financial performance and efficiency in organizations.  Sami is currently the IT leader assigned to the effort of the project that we’re going to tell you about today.  He’s leading the transformative initiative to move University Hospitals of Cleveland to an integrated electronic health record system.  This is what they call Epic, and it is certainly an epic 600 million investment project that will standardize all hospitals into a common system and streamlining processes and consolidating one patient record.

Another person involved on this project is Lora Niazov, and she’s currently the director of the Enterprise Program Management Office at University Hospitals. Lora has also just become is an Adjunct Instructor of Project Management at the John Carroll University  She has over 20 years of experience in healthcare, information technology, and manufacturing industries.

And then the other person on the project is Gubran Ahmed, and he is an experienced program management office leader with demonstrated success and strength in strategic planning, process improvement and problem solving, change management, and relationship building across many functional areas in organizations.  Currently Gubran is working at University Hospitals and is leading the Enterprise Program Management Office with a portfolio carrying a budget of over $200 million, encompassing 150 active projects.  And he tells us a little bit about that, as well, in the podcast.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Yeah he does.  And all three guests are going to provide a unique perspective on what they’re doing with this massive program and how they’re seeing it unfold.  And this is big.

WENDY GROUNDS:  This is Epic.

BILL YATES:  This is Epic.  The name of the software is so appropriate.  There are 29,000 users.  We’re talking 22 terabytes of data and 3 million patient records that are a part of this conversion and implementation.  I can’t wait to get into it, hear some of the nitty-gritty from them, and hear some of their takeaways, their advice from implementation of this size.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, their project tagline is “Best implementation of all time.”  We really do think so.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, I can’t wait for our listeners to weigh in and say, “Yeah, that does sound like it.”  Or “No, mine’s better.  I’m going to tell Wendy about it.”

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  And listeners, if you have an epic project, if you are working on a project that you think the story is worth sharing, that you’ve got some incredible lessons learned, or you’ve got a project that you think you’d like our audience to hear about,