Services - Project Management

The Fusion offering in pursuit of health project management is a core service, with all members of Fusion Health taking an active role in this aspect of business. However, Virginia de Vere and Geof Beesley have specific interest in this field and generally lead the Fusion service offering.

Over 70% of projects are deemed to fail due to weak or inadequate communication. The case often arises where by one party believes that another is adequately informed and pursuing the correct course of action. Only too often this is not actually the case at all, either due to a shortfall in resources, a failure to understand the process and tasks that must be addressed, or failure to set appropriate time scales for the completion of individual project tasks and phases. Similarly, the case is often exaggerated due to the provision of an inadequate time scale!

The Fusion Health partners have all acted to assist both public and private sector bodies to deliver projects to time, quality and budget, avoiding one of the traditional roles of the Project Manager of being little more than a "fee guardian". Fusion Health actively engages with stakeholders, designing the process and project programme that is required to deliver any given project against a realistic time frame and then ensuring that all parties clearly understand their role and responsibilities. We actively engage in follow up activities to ensure learning and completion of project arrangements is a key element to project success.

Only then can the process of actually delivering a project commence.

The key areas that Fusion Health addresses are:

• Definition of the project process, i.e. setting the appropriate task list against realistic time scales
• Development of Business Cases, including the author-ship
• Development of clinical and non clinical specifications and general stakeholder engagement with the emphasis on obtaining project "buy-in"
• Provision of "sound" project advice, based upon experience derived from the delivery of similar projects, be they associated with the delivery of a business case or development of clinical specifications or other health associated functions.

Fusion Health lays specific importance against the understanding of the project process. This is often best achieved via the embedding of a Fusion team member into the host organisation on a dedicated basis, be it for a set period per week, or a more flexible "ad hoc" approach.

The lead members of Fusion Health can also and have already delivered project management advice to Trusts who wish to retain the PM role in-house, but do not necessarily have the experience to do so. In cases such as these, a mentoring role has been adopted, leading to the effective transfer of knowledge and skill to the Trust for the long term benefit of future projects.