Module Learning Outcomes to be Assessed:-
This module is designed to give students an opportunity to be an individual contributor, working on a project team to define, plan and manage a project. Particular focus is given to hands-on practice of the processes, developing a project plan, and using project management software to build and then present the project team results in class with a debrief of key points.
This module introduces Project Management and identifies the tools and techniques to resolve problems associated with bringing projects in on time and within an established budget. Discussion will include topics such as project scheduling, PERT/CPM, resource levelling, team dynamics and cost estimates. The student will learn how to develop project proposals and project reports
The student will learn the primary elements of Project Management to such an extent that he/she is able to develop a detailed project plan for a small or large- scale project. Additionally, the student will become familiar with negotiation, team building and quantitative estimation skills.
This module also focuses on both the manufacturing and service businesses and the internal and external operations involved at all levels of the supply chain in a global environment. Students will learn how the coordination of all the functions within these operations impacts on the movement and delivery of goods and/or services to the right place at the right time. Emphasis is placed on the importance of adopting a “total systems” approach by the firm and its networks, which enhance the value adding activities of the supply chain and its logistical application to achieve customer satisfaction. The module also demonstrates the strategic importance of developing and implementing comprehensive operations for both these types of business.
Learning Outcomes
Upon the successful completion of the module, the student should be able to:
• Understand the primary concepts and practices underpinning Project management
• Be able to devise and implement a project management plan
• Work effectively within a project team
• Understand the contexts for project management and project planning in a localized and/or global context

Holland Rise Health and Social Care Trust Background
Holland Rise Health & Social Care Trust provides community health care and social care services to a population of 100,000 people living in an inner city and suburban area of some 450 square miles in the United Kingdom. The Trust was formed five years ago from the merger of the previous separate Holland Rise Community Health Care Trust and Social Services Departments.
The Community Health Care Trust employed staff with medical training from a variety of disciplines such as District Nurses and Physiotherapists. They visit patients in their homes and provide care to them there.
The Social Services Department employed staff with non¬medical care skills also from a wide variety of disciplines such as Adult Carers and Child Protection Officers who also visit clients in their own homes and provide social care. The objective of both organisations was to enable people to go on living in their own homes for as long as possible, and thereby not to have to move into Care Homes run by the Trust.
This merger was a result of a new central government policy which was being piloted in the region in which Holland Rise falls. There are nine other Community Trusts within the region, none of which are so progressive in their thinking as Holland Rise. The objectives of the government policy are to improve the care provided and reduce the overall cost of providing that care. The new combined Trust was given a large degree of organizational and financial autonomy within the framework of overall management by the local region, and an energetic, forward thinking Chief Executive, John Jones, previously the Director of Social Services, was appointed to lead the new combined Trust. John Jones immediately appointed the hard¬working Operations Director of the Community Health Care Trust, Dr Southgate to the position of Business Development Director – effectively his deputy.
The Trust is headquartered in an old Victorian Mental Health Hospital with 50 other offices, clinics and care homes scattered over the geographical area served by the Trust. Very few of these offices have been purpose built.
The Trust now employs 3000 staff split into a relatively small Head Office team including Finance, Personnel and Business Development and the professional care staff who are divided into 3 Directorates as follows:
• Adult Care
• Mental Health Care
• Child Care Services.
Each Directorate is in turn divided into 24 professional care disciplines such as District Nursing, Physiotherapy and Child Immunization. Each professional care discipline is, in turn, divided into up to 5 teams spread over the area covered by Holland Rise. There are in total 84 such teams each containing only specialists in the team’s particular discipline.
The care delivery process
The Trust is one of the 39 totally separate organisations which deliver care to the geographic area of Holland Rise. The other organisations are:
• 3 separate Hospital Trusts who each provide Accident & Emergency services, maternity services and a full range of clinical services to carry out operations on patients as required.
• 35 Doctor Practices (Clinics) containing a total of 60 doctors. These Practices are all contracted independently to the National Health Service and run effectively as individual small businesses that are paid by the National Health Service depending on how many patients are registered with them. The 35 Practices have formed themselves into a local group to meet regularly and discuss local problems, particularly the problems they have in dealing with Holland Rise Trust and the three separate Hospital Trusts.
People in need of care are referred to the Trust from a range of sources, for example the doctors, the hospitals, police, schools, neighbours and next¬of­kin. The referrals contain wide disparities in quality and quantity of information and are normally directed to a local Trust office which may not house the professional care team who should deal with the particular problem so the referral is then referred on within the Trust finally reaching the correct team who take action. Referrals are received on a 7×24 hour basis and are actioned immediately if they appear to be very urgent.
The key actions following receipt of the referral are typically:
• A visit to the referred person in need of care by a senior care professional from the apparently most relevant care team, who carries out an assessment of the patient and may generate referrals to other teams within the Trust for their follow­up.
• Creation of a hand¬written care plan. Some care plans are very complicated and some very simple. For example the Child Protection teams draw up very complex plans to solve the domestic problems leading to abuse of the child whereas the Podiatry teams are only concerned with scheduling visits to cut elderly patients’ toenails.
• Sign­off of the costs of delivering the care by the Team Manager, or adjustment if too expensive.
• Delivery of the care services, which vary in duration from one hour to several years depending on the discipline and type of care.
• Review of progress and revision of the care plan as necessary.
Each professional care discipline has developed its own styles of assessment form and care plan to record information about the patient, and each uses its own medical and care jargon to describe the same condition. Although a patient may receive care services from several teams in parallel, each of which is delivering its own specialty – for example district nurses dressing leg ulcers or occupational therapists modifying the home environment – no attempt is made to co¬ordinate the care delivery or exchange care plans between the teams so they may well turn up at the same patient’s house on the same day and at the same time and one will then have to re¬schedule their visit.
The teams are traditionally suspicious of sharing patient related information in case they make patient diagnosis mistakes, and the mental health and child protection teams are particularly concerned about security of information about their patients and clients.
The IT systems
The main IT software systems used in the Trust are not integrated with each other and comprise:
• The legacy Social Care system, which is primarily concerned with providing a basis for analysing the type and source of referrals received by the individual social care teams and recording the type of care and cost of care delivered in response to the referral. No attempt is made to record the outcome of the care delivered and all notes made by the social workers are hand¬written and filed locally.
• The legacy Health Care system which is primarily concerned with collecting details of the activities carried out by the health care workers so that mandatory statistical analyses can be forwarded to the Ministry of Health in central government.
• An effective email system linking all of the offices together as well as to the outside NHS world via the systems operated by the Regional Office.
• A financial management and payroll system.
The legacy systems are old and very user-unfriendly in look and feel, and staff activity data is entered by clerks located in the scattered offices and then used for statistical report generation by the central IT Department. None of the health and social care professionals ever make use of the information in these systems.
The network linking all of the offices together is the responsibility of the IT Team in the Regional Office. They have wider and deeper IT infrastructure skills than the Trust.

The project
Having merged the administration of the two Community Health and Social Care organisations into one central team, John Jones has decided that he now wants to make advances in the provision of more effective care to his client base.
He has enthusiastically led the Trust in active participation in several EU organized pan European matched funded R & D projects exploring the benefits of multi¬disciplinary care teams based on patient­centred IT systems with composite care plans.
He now wishes to implement this strategy right across the Trust and has motivated many staff within the Trust with his vision of the future comprising teams of staff drawn from several disciplines developing an integrated care plan round the needs of their patient/client and working in an information sharing environment to achieve better co-ordination of care delivery and thereby hopefully faster recovery of the patient or at least a more comfortable supported existence at home. As always in healthcare, all staff within the Trust are already working to the limits of their available time. This project involves further changes to the organisation, ways of working and the provision of a comprehensive integrated IT system.
In one of the European projects, some good R & D work was done on a pilot project within the Trust by a successful, but small, niche software company, XYZ MediTech Ltd. who specialize in Mental Healthcare IT systems. They are very keen to develop a software package for a much wider health and social care market and see this leading edge project to be an excellent opportunity to bypass existing Healthcare and Social Care software suppliers and establish a market lead.
Against the advice of the Regional Office’s IT Officer, John Jones has succeeded in obtaining approval from the Minister of Health in the Government to bypass normal procurement procedures and to create a fixed price contract containing stiff penalty clauses for late delivery with XYZ MediTech Ltd., who tendered against a well-structured but high level (bullet point style) Requirements Specification written jointly by staff from the Trust and the Regional Office. The Regional IT Officer was concerned about the financial capacity of XYZ MediTech Ltd. to develop such a large software package.
The Trust’s team involved in the Requirements Specification comprised the Trust’s IT Manager and IT Systems Manager and four managers seconded from the District Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Child Protection and Mental Social Work teams respectively who were chosen on the basis of their reputation for being innovative in their thinking and supportive of the overall multi¬disciplinary team concept. The Requirements Specification Team Leader was a senior Systems Consultant, James Saunders, who was seconded from the Regional IT team for the purpose. The Requirements Specification comprised an overall vision of the future written by John Jones and up to two pages of bullet points for each Care Discipline identifying their particular process and information needs. An extract from the Requirements Specification is provided in the Appendix.
All of the Trust’s Directors are in agreement with John Jones’ vision of the future but have targets to meet in the short-term and huge organisations to run. No plans currently exist of how the care staff will be re-organized into the multi¬disciplinary teams.
If the project is successful the Region intends to implement the same reorganization everywhere and the Minister of Health will take the same approach right across the country. Both the Region and the Ministry want to monitor progress.
Dr Southgate has been made responsible for driving the whole project and has recruited you as Project Manager reporting to her, to take day¬-to­day responsibility. The goals have been set by John Jones, the Regional Director and the Minister of Health of a full live pilot implementation starting in 2 years with completion of the whole project within 5 years. No detailed plans exist for how these goals might be achieved.

Question
The case study indicates that you have been appointed to be the project manager for this project, reporting to Dr Southgate. In common with many National Health projects you have been asked to use the PRINCE2© methodology or any other appropriate methodology for this project.
You are to prepare a project management plan including the following:
A. highlighting the main management concerns associated with the various aspects of this project. (10 marks)
B. Identifying and analysing the main risks associated with the project. What actions would you take to avoid or mitigate the effect of the risks? (40 marks)
C. Other relevant sections in a Project Management Plan (40 marks)

10 Marks for structure & presentation

Appendix: Example page from the Holland Rise Requirements Specification
Ref Function Name Criteria
3 Production of Treatment/Care Plans
3.1 Access to Assessment information The software will provide easy access to Assessment information and Assessment summaries both for individual staff members and, where appropriate, other members of the team.
3.2 Access to history The software will provide access to historic Assessments and Treatment/Care Plans.
3.3 Access to all records The software will provide seamless access to all the required records on the software irrespective of the discipline.
3.4 Links to Episode of Care The software will automatically link the
Treatment/Care Plan to the appropriate Episode of Care.
3.5 Development of Uni and Multi disciplinary plans The software will support the development of both ‘Uni’ and ‘Multi’ disciplinary Treatment/Care Plans.
3.6 Record goals and objectives The software will record goals and objectives and allow for time scales and anticipated outcomes in coded form for subsequent analysis.
3.7 Review date assignment The software will assist the User assigning review dates.
3.8 Highlight reviews The software will automatically highlight imminent or late reviews.
3.9 Record of unsatisfied demand The software will facilitate the recording of the reasons for unsatisfied demand.
3.10 Record reason for Care/Service The software will record the primary reason for Care/Service delivery.
3.11 Library of standardised plans The software will contain a library of standardised Treatment/Care/Service Plans which can be tailored to individual needs.
3.12 Updating plans The software will allow the facility to update or add to Treatment/Care Plans and enable staff to record manually the date of any changes made.
The software will facilitate the production of updated Treatment/Care Plan based on earlier versions.
3.13 Correction of content It will be possible to ‘correct’ the content of a Treatment/Care Plan.
ASSIGNMENT MARKING CRITERIA
MARK 29 or less 30 – 39 40 – 49 50 – 59 60 – 69 70 +

CONTENT:
Has the question been answered?
Vague, random, unrelated material Some mention of the issue, but a collection of disparate points Barely answers the question – just reproduces what knows about the topic Some looseness/
Digressions Well focused Highly focused
TOPIC
KNOWLEDGE
Is there evidence of having read widely
and use of appropriate and up to date material to make a case? No evidence of reading.
No use of theory – not even hinted at implicitly. No evidence of reading.
An implicit hint at some knowledge of theory, etc. No evidence of reading. Very basic theories mentioned but not developed or well used. Some reading evident, but confined to core texts. Good reading.
Good range of theories included. Excellent reading.
Well chosen theories.
UNDERSTANDING & SYNTHESIS
Are ideas summarized rather than being reproduced, and are they inter-related with other ideas?
No theory included. Vague assertions/poor explanations. Long winded descriptions of theory.
Some long winded sections.
Some quotations, but stand alone.
Some inter- connections. Good summary of theory.
Good use of quotations that flow with narrative.
Good inter-connections. Succinct, effective summaries of theory. Excellent choice and threading of quotations into argument. Good counterpoising of a range of perspectives.
APPLICATION
Does it show appropriate use of theory in a
practical situation? No examples No/limited/
inappropriate examples Few examples Uneven examples Good examples Excellent range of examples.

ANALYSIS
Does it identify the key issues, etc in a given scenario, proposal or argument? Vague assertions about issues. Largely descriptive with no identification and analysis of central issues. Limited insight into issues. Some good observations. Good, detailed analysis. Comprehensive range of issues identified and discussed fully.
EVALUATION & RECOMMENDATIONS
Does it critically assess material?
Are there workable and imaginative solutions? No evaluation. Uncritical acceptance of material. Some evaluation but weak. Little insight. Good interpretation. Some but limited sophistication in argument.
Good critical assessment. Independent thought displayed. Full critical assessment and substantial individual insight.
REFERENCING
Thorough and accurate citation and referencing No referencing No referencing Limited/poor referencing Some inconsistencies in referencing Appropriate referencing Appropriate referencing
PRESENTATION
Logical and coherent structure to argument and effective presentation No structure apparent.
Poor presentation. Poor structure.
Poor presentation. Acceptable, but uneven structure.
Reasonable presentation. Reasonable structure.
Good presentation. Good argument.
Well presented material. Excellent argument.
Very effective presentation format.