MHA 615. Operational Plan. Business & Marketing Essay

OPERATIONAL PLAN
MHA 615
11/01/2020
Executive Summary
Employee retention is a significant issue that Concord Medical Centre faces, among other organizations, which should be solved to reduce staff turnover and other negative consequences. Employee retention is a process that involves scrutinizing the skills of various employees and applying them to improving the organization's productivity each day. Employee retention will be improved by implementing various strategies to motivate the employees and ensure their morale is high. The human resource will be responsible for identifying the solution to employee retention, identifying various strategies, implementing retention programs, and monitoring the results. This project's data will be collected through interviews by giving questionnaires to employees to get their feedback. Establishing an employee retention program in Concord Medical Centre will ensure the organization solves the employee retention issue, retaining their excellent skills to facilitate the institution's smooth running.
Project Charter
Project Mission Statement
This project will focus on employee retention at Concord Medical Center, through offering a competitive salary package, training, and development, solving relationships and performance issues and offering career path development.
Project Scope
Concord Medical Center is a 244- bed hospital that serves Contra Costa and southern Solano counties. The facility is well known for its cancer and cardiac care including open heart surgery and cardiology. They also run orthopedic, neurology and general surgery programs. Due to its contribution and ability to address some of the most disturbing diseases, the facility receives high number of patients. This has often resulted to work burnout among staff leading to a high staff turnover rate. This has consequently affected the quality of services leading to low returns. The aim of this project is to address the problem by looking into the employee welfare and at the possibility of offering a competitive salary package. Moreover, given the hospital mostly focuses on cancer and other related illness, it will require that the employees be taken through training and career development for them to update their knowledge in the field. Further, this project will also review work-life balance so as to have a balanced approach in the employee performance against their social life and relationships. We believe these strategies will work to bolster the staff morale and enhance employee retention amid rising needs for medical staff.
High-level Requirements
The completion of this project will have numerous impacts on the facility, which include;
* Improve patient outcome
* Improve employee satisfaction
* Enhance staff retention and provide job security to the employees
Assigned Project Manager and Authority Level
The project manager will be John Muir, the human resource manager who will be responsible for the budget, timeline, scope and performance. Anything above him will be communicated to the manager.
Summary Milestones
Summary Milestones
The project will kick off on February 1
Metrics will be defined by March 15
Planning will occur for 3 months
Implementation will go live on June 15
Stakeholder Influences
The major stakeholders include;
Concord Medical Center leadership- provide the needed financial support
Medical Staff – Will be key stakeholders in giving suggestions and approving the strategies better work performance
Patients – Will be impacted directly as the end receivers of the services provided by the staff
Functional organizations and their participation
* Human resource management: This is the major department in the project and it will focus on finding out the best salary packages for employees, enhancing work-life balance, organizing for employee training and career development plans.
* Accounting and finance department: The department will be required to provide the necessary finances as recommended by the human resource department. It will be vital in determining how achievable or unachievable the proposed solutions could be in as far as financing them.
* Customer service: The customer service department will deal with customer issues, answer customer inquiries and addressing patient concerns and complaints. It will be critical in providing necessary feedback from patients on the nature of service provided and how well it can be improved.
Organizational Environmental and External Assumptions and Constraints
Some of the considerations that need to be reviewed and that may impact the project include;
* Organizational support from both leadership and the staff
* Availability of finances
* Patient satisfaction with the offered services
Financial Business Case- Return on Investment
By addressing the challenge, the facility will be able to provide quality care services to the patients. In return, the volume of patients will increase which will led to high revenue that can sustain the entire work plan.
Executive Project Sponsor with Approval Signature
Jane A. Willemsen, Executive Vice President and President, Hospital Operations – Walnut Creek
& Concord Campuses and
John Muir, Human resource manager.
Problem solving method
1 What data will you be collecting and measuring?
The data collected in as far as the problem of staff retention concerns information from the employees on several issues affecting them. The staff is the project's major beneficiaries will provide information on their job satisfaction and suggestions on how things should be made better. The other aspect would be a systematic review of other similar healthcare facilities to understand their strategies in retaining employees in as far as work-life balance is concerned. Also, data on the best salary packages will be retrieved through the systematic review to understand how competitive the facility's salaries are compared to other healthcare providers in the same rank. Another critical aspect of data required includes the guidelines and standards set by the health body for employee training and career development. Given that the facility deals mostly with cancer, a field that is evolving day and night will be very important to receive the standards, training manuals, and guidelines.
2 Why did you choose this data?
The data will provide the necessary information, which will allow Concord Medical Center to overcome its major challenge of staff turnover. Firstly, it will focus on the employees who are the foundation of the problem, and therefore any strategy that is geared towards improving their work environment should originate from them. The systematic review of other facilities could be crucial in ensuring that whatever salary and work conditions or work schedules offered at Concord Medical Center match are higher than those offered in other facilities. Lastly, given the healthcare field is ever-evolving, and in particular cancer treatment, it will be essential to have updated training and guidelines on dealing with the emerging challenges.
3 How will you collect the data?
The human resource manager will schedule an interview with the staff to collect their views. The employees will also be given questionnaires, which they can fill to provide comprehensive and documented feedback. To carry out the systematic review of other facilities, the human resource department with a team of employees will organize to visit other facilities to collect data on the competitiveness of Concord's work environment and salaries. Observation will also be critical in this scenario.
4 What story does the data tell as it relates to your operational problem?
The data will be crucial in providing an overview of the situation on the ground. It will help understand the employees' point of dissatisfaction and what causes the high staff turnover. It will be crucial in involving the staff in the project, as they are the key stakeholders who will be affected by the changes or lack of any changes as far as the project is concerned. Besides, the data they will provide will be crucial in guiding the facility's response to the challenges they are facing.
5 How could you make sure the data is representative of the actual situation?
To ensure that the data represents actual scenarios, the staff will be given questionnaires, they will unanimously fill. For the interviews, the human resource manager will bring in an interviewer who is not used to the staff to provide them with an environment where they can speak freely without fear or intimidation or bias from the management. To collect data from other facilities for comparison purposes, the human resource department and other staff who are not directly within the employees' sphere of practice will carry it out. In this way, the data that will be collected will be very objective and free of biases.
6 Build a hypothesis
H0: Addressing the staff turnover problem at Concord Medical Centre will help deal with employee turnover at the facility and improve service delivery quality.
H1: Staff dissatisfaction and employee turnover will increase, leading to poor quality of services.
Balanced Scorecard
In any business undertaking, it is usually assumed that what you measure is what you get. Within an organization, the measurement approaches employed will determine the managers' attitudes and behaviors. Notably, executives also understand that conventional procedures for measurement can give misleading information that harms the organization's progress and innovations. While the measures worked effectively in past years, the organization's new challenges in the contemporary era call for comprehensive and articulate measures that will address the organization's diverse aspects. The balanced scorecard can assist to move strategy to execution with minimal challenges. There are important elements that must be included in order to fulfill the measurement and execution process successfully. First, there must be clarity of the mission and vision of the organization. The financial, customer, internal business process and learning and growing are also important in ensuring that there is a success. The measures must also be linked to the strategy of the company to warrant effectiveness.
Another important aspect is aligning the structure and strategy of the company to meet the desired goals. With a top to bottom approach, the strategy's alignment will be easy and results will be achieved with ease. There are four main perspectives in the measurement of a balanced scorecard. These perspectives are financial perspective, internal business perspective, innovation and learning perspective, and customer perspective. Through the balanced scorecard, we can see that the measures are limited and prevents information overload to the managers. This ensures that there is effectiveness during the process of decision-making. The use of many measures in measuring success affects companies' point and leads to information overload through the balanced scorecard. Managers are offered with incentives to focus on the few measures that have been established. Through the adoption of the balanced scorecard, many companies have managed to save costs, enhance productivity, increase customer satisfaction, improve shareholder value, and enhance innovation or new products launch times. Moreover, the process protects the company from suboptimization of the service, ensuring that all the important elements are considered. The metrics used in the scorecard ensure that all the important aspects are covered and priority is given to the business's most important aspects (SHRM, n.d.).
In the balanced scorecard, the color red, yellow, and green are used to indicate various developments. Red implies that the metric's outcome is below the established target, implying that there is a need for urgent attention. Color yellow implies are below the regular target, but within a level of tolerance. This requires analysis and close monitoring. With green, the results are usually on or above the required target.
The Balanced Scorecard
Goal

Target

Owner

Review Frequency

Review 1

Review 2

Review 3

Financial Perspective

Turnover rates and costs

99%

HR

Monthly

50

65

92

Job satisfaction rates

70%

 HR

Monthly

45

39

88

Customer Perspective

Customer satisfaction with new-hire

90%

 HR

Monthly

92

55

67

Customer cooperation with new-hire

80%

 HR

Monthly

65

50

76

Internal Business Perspective

New-hire satisfaction with orientation

75%

 HR

Monthly

88

87

92

Supervisor satisfaction with orientation

80%

 HR

Monthly

84

84

99

Innovation and Learning Perspective

Technology leadership of new-hire

70%

 HR

Monthly

45

76

73

New-hire contribution to marketing

80%

 HR

Monthly

56

50

82

The four perspectives, which are the basis for the targets, are important because they reveal the main issues that will help the organization achieve its mission and vision. Moreover, it provides a proper basis for decision-making and ensures that the organization's goals are achieved. From the customer perspective, it enhances the organization's mission and is primarily focused on the customer. Based on the balanced scorecard measures, it is clear that the metrics will reveal how the workers perform concerning the customers' perspective. It helps the management establish proper priorities for translating the vision into real actions that benefit the customers. Moreover, the measures allow managers to determine the new workers' effectiveness after being incorporated into the organization. Customer perspective establishes a basis for understanding the company's quality, performance, time, and performance in the perspective of the clients. These aspects are important because they are used to determine whether the company is fulfilling its mandate as outlined in the vision and mission (Kaplan & Norton, 1992).
The internal business perspective determines the areas where the company excels at. The workers' performance is based on the effectiveness of the internal processes, which warrants whether the company can attain the established goals. Therefore, when the managers evaluate how workers perform, they can also get insight into how the internal system influences their performance. The basis of these measurements is from the internal processes and how they impact customers. Innovation and learning are other important perspectives in the balanced scorecard. As the business environment continues to change, workers need to be prepared and commit to continuous learning for effectiveness. This will ensure that the organization can innovate, create new incentives for customer service, and enhance service delivery through new technologies and policies. Therefore, the innovation and learning perspective is important because it allows workers to prepare for any organization's potential changes (Kaplan & Norton, 1993).
Finally, the financ...