Team Skills Weekly Staff Meeting, Team Structure, Authority

Assignment Objective
Find an operational challenge that would benefit from having a project deployed, and build a complete project charter. The charter should be a minimum of 2 pages. This is where you will begin to develop your final project for this course.
Additional Guidance
There are key points that must be completed and skills needed during the project:
Team Skills
Weekly staff meeting
Operations Balanced Scorecard and other metrics
Projects progress and problem solving
Getting things done
Clear accountability
Adequate resources
Documentation of meetings, activities, action items, metrics, etc…
Team Structure and Authority
It is important to have the right team members that will help move the project forward. There will need to be accountability and documentation of roles and responsibilities. Like anything, everybody has to do their part to complete the task at hand. Unfortunately, one underperformer can derail your whole project. In order to ensure everybody understands the scope, having a project charter is key, you will lay out ground rules, expectations and then all the details surrounding the project. This is the time you will also lay out the time commitment, as it relates to meeting times and work that will need to be completed. Having deadlines is important, sticking to them is even more important.
We are very good at putting together robust documents with great ideas, but forget to assign responsible parties and deadlines for deliverables. Without these items, the plan is nothing but words on a piece of paper.
Project management is a key tool that is used to enhance operations, as it helps you review processes and find the way to be effective and efficient with the resources you have, and helps you find ways to be innovative to re-engineer your work.
Project Selection
How do you decide what projects you want to invest your capital on – human and financial?
The leadership team must decide what their focus of the year will be and which of these require a project to complete. Referring back to your balanced scorecard will be key in making these decisions. This will help keep you focused as it is easy to get wrapped up in the large amount of work that needs to be addressed. By keeping your balanced scorecard focused, you will be able to easily identify what projects need to be selected.
The leadership team will need to lay out all the potential projects, assign a priority to each one, and define a timeline. Once that has been established, they need to identify the strategic alignment, financial impact, quality/productivity impact, customers/patients impact, staff availability and training and probability of success of each project. Once you assign points to each one of these categories, it will help you prioritize the projects.
Project Charter
Once you have identified your projects, you will need to pull together the key stakeholders. Begin by identifying the executive and physician stakeholders, and then the core team. The charter sets the groundwork, reviews the ground rules, the objective and goal of the project, timeline, and activities that need to be completed.
There are four key categories of a charter: (Input sample charter)
Time
Cost
Scope
Performance
How do you identify your stakeholders?
These are those that are directly impacted by the project. Who is held accountable for the project? Who will be part of the decision making process? Who will own action items?
These are the questions that need to be asked as you build your project team. You will first and foremost need an executive and possibly a physician champion (depending on the kind of project and how clinical it may be). Your department has decided to look at ways to improve patient access. Who should be part of this team? Medical director? Director? Manager? All of these individuals have direct ties to the work being done and should be part of the team. Where your executive champions may not be available for every meeting, they need to sponsor your project, advocate for the work being done, and help with the tough decisions or situations that may come down the pike.
Feasibility Analysis
As you develop the charter, it is important to measure the feasibility of the project. What is realistic and will drive change? If you propose building a new facility, do you have executive support for this? Or are you going to look at adding a scheduling department to streamline the work to help improve access by taking non-clinical work out of clinical space? Which one of these approaches is more feasible?
The Elements of the Project Charter 
As you work through all of these fine points, you will begin to build your ‘Project Charter'. As stated previously, there are four areas you need to cover in the charter, this document will also serve as your executive summary. When you need to re-focus and ensure you are staying on track, this document will help you.
Project mission statement
Project purpose or justification and connection to strategic goals (that balanced scorecard creeps in again)
High-level requirements that satisfy customers, sponsors and other stakeholders
Assigned project manager and authority level
Summary milestones
Stakeholder influences
Functional organizations and their expected level of participation
Organizational, environmental, and external assumptions and constraints
Financial business case, budget, and return on investment
Project sponsor with approval signature