Agile Project Management And Its Application In Medical Practice

The Healthcare industry is responsible to provide the best care for patients by using advanced tools and technologies. But as we move ahead in this 21st century the healthcare practices need to be swifter in delivering their services at the right time. To carry out these processes smoothly they need to adopt the latest project management approach. Some of the trending project management models used for managing huge healthcare projects are Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Lean, and DevOps. Some of these models are also integrated (hybrid models) to achieve the highest productivity and timely delivery of projects.

Integrating Project Management Triangle for Medical Practices

The project management triangle consists of three main factors the project manager must consider that’s is scope, cost, and time. The application of this project management triangle is extremely crucial for all the healthcare projects regardless of the project models (Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Lean, and DevOps) they choose to use. To keep the project management triangle equilateral in shape, the project manager must equally adjust or incorporate changes to the main actors (scope, cost, and time) to maintain the balance. For example, if the healthcare manager works on cost-cutting but does adjust the scope and the time factors equally then this might result in poor quality projects delivered.

How does agile work in healthcare?

By using the agile model for managing healthcare projects, it helps to develop a highly-qualified team of project teams consisting of managers, clinicians, software developers, designers, testers, and data analysts, data scientists, and marketing experts. Agile practices help medical practitioners to focus on adopting innovative methods of patient care.

Understanding the Agile Model within Healthcare

The Agile Model manages healthcare processes by managing the following activities:

Engaging Product Owners- The agile process helps to engage the product owners who can be patients, physicians, hospital staff, etc. at every phase of the project development. This makes them accountable too for the quality and the service of the final product.

Using Scrum Roles- By adopting the agile model, the healthcare industry manages its projects very effectively. They make use of the many roles that the agile principle has to offer as that of a Scrum Master. The Scrum master’s role is to conduct daily stand-ups and review the team’s tasks daily and giving feedback for the same.

Using the Iterative Process- The agile model helps the healthcare project teams to adopt the incremental and iterative development process. They make use of Kanban, scrum, test, and feature-driven development practices for developing high-quality projects.

Using DataOps- Agile practices help the healthcare teams to leverage dataops and data analytics by implementing multiple technologies and bringing together the product owners from diverse backgrounds and skillsets. This helps to form an expert team of professionals who work together to build a successful incremental project.

Agile Model a boon to healthcare? The agile model is considered to be a flexible and reliable project development model, especially for healthcare projects. To achieve more benefits of the agile practice this model can be integrated with other project models and used as a hybrid tool to gain the best project results. Earlier most of the healthcare practitioners were unaware of the agile project management models. But now due to the growing demand for delivering projects on time, and with the superior quality applying agile practices to healthcare, projects have become mandatory.