Why is Implementation Essential?
What does air traffic control do? Stick with me here. Air traffic control functions to minimize delays. They ensure passenger safety throughout departure, travel, and landing. They manage the flow of aircrafts – in and out of their respective airspace. This is your implementation team. How? Picture this. Airports are the teams involved – be it two internal teams, your business and a customer, etc. The planes being sent between airports, or teams, are data, reports, knowledge patients, etc. Just as air traffic control facilitates the flow of planes between airports, implementation facilitates the flow of information between teams. Implementation operates to minimize delays in onboarding. Implementation ensures smooth transitions between organization and customer. Implementation manages the flow of deliverables, due dates, and phases. Implementation is your air traffic control.
Organization. Organization. Organization.
This is your guiding principle – organization. Keep your ducks in a row. The moment you begin to rely on recollection for fine details that transpired in last week’s client touchpoint, you’re behind. The moment you have to-do lists in multiple apps, half of which you forget house important notes, you’re behind. Start organized and stay organized. Here’s how we are holding ourselves to these standards:
Holding Efficient Meetings.
One of the best ways to add structure to not only your life, but your team’s and clients’, is to be consistent and thorough in the way you conduct meetings. What does this entail? Legible notes, communicated agendas, and tracked deliverables. Develop a template that will allow you to capture the details of your meetings – not just a blank Word doc and some chicken scratch notes for each meeting. Curate a document that you can copy over from meeting to meeting, enabling you to work smarter, saving time, while consistently producing something structured. Taking the time to do this now will pay off in the long run. What fields should you capture in your template?
Take the time to go back and make your notes legible. You will be typing quickly during the meeting, attempting to capture every point and comment (depending on your level of project management OCD); give yourself some time to revisit what you wrote and clean it up so future you won’t need a time machine and stronger lenses.
Take the time to go back and make your notes legible. You will be typing quickly during the meeting, attempting to capture every point and comment (depending on your level of project management OCD); give yourself some time to revisit what you wrote and clean it up so future you won’t need a time machine and stronger lenses.
- Meeting name
- Meeting attendees
- Date and time
- Agenda
- Notes
- Follow-ups
Bonus points: send the agenda before the call and send the follow-ups after. Preparing the attendees of the conversation with the agenda ensures they are briefed on the topics prior to entering the discussion as a courtesy, and it also provides the recipients with an opportunity to recommend additional talking points. Disseminating the follow-ups after the meeting is a strong practice resulting in increased accountability (stakeholders see their names and are aware that a deliverable relies on them), providing the attendees with a summary of action items for quick reference, and offering the mental confirmation that you are tracking what has been said in a structured manner.
Tracking Your Deliverables.
At this point you should now have a (virtual) pile of completed meeting templates with follow-ups, names, and the works. How do you keep track of this growing list of deliverables? The answer should not be “by memory,” or “sifting through my desktop.” Make a deliverable tracker. Devise a system that lists each deliverable that needs to be checked-off prior to completing your implementation. This is your repository; this is your home base; this is your master document.
How does it look? The beauty of this tracker is it can be as simple as you would like (granted it possesses the listed, fundamental pieces). It can take any shape – spreadsheet, list, etc. Just be sure it contains all of the initiatives needed to launch – whether they have not been started, are in progress, or completed.
Bonus points: build in dates that the items need to be completed by to further bolster your resource and keep the process on track.
How does it look? The beauty of this tracker is it can be as simple as you would like (granted it possesses the listed, fundamental pieces). It can take any shape – spreadsheet, list, etc. Just be sure it contains all of the initiatives needed to launch – whether they have not been started, are in progress, or completed.
Bonus points: build in dates that the items need to be completed by to further bolster your resource and keep the process on track.
Communicating Internally.
While less cooks in the kitchen may be true in some cases, that doesn’t mean keep the rest of the restaurant staff out of the loop – especially executive owners. Though the project manager may be the one responsible for checking off the day-to-day tasks, speaking directly to fellow project or implementation managers, it is still imperative that the internal stakeholders and leadership members are aware of developments – this includes risks.
This is not a call to disburse daily updates on every piece of dialogue or even every new task completion; this is a call to provide the pertinent management members with a high-level summary of both what has been accomplished over the week, any important communications, and what notable risks exist. In the world of implementation – one of the best pieces of advice is “overcommunicate.”
You need to escalate red flags before it’s too late. Believe me, you would rather inform your team of potential risks while the opportunity to combat them still remains, as opposed to watching your fighting chance dwindle because you held your breath. Therefore, the moment you feel heartburn over things like a fast-approaching deadline or radio silence from a customer, escalate, escalate, escalate.
This is not a call to disburse daily updates on every piece of dialogue or even every new task completion; this is a call to provide the pertinent management members with a high-level summary of both what has been accomplished over the week, any important communications, and what notable risks exist. In the world of implementation – one of the best pieces of advice is “overcommunicate.”
You need to escalate red flags before it’s too late. Believe me, you would rather inform your team of potential risks while the opportunity to combat them still remains, as opposed to watching your fighting chance dwindle because you held your breath. Therefore, the moment you feel heartburn over things like a fast-approaching deadline or radio silence from a customer, escalate, escalate, escalate.
Maintaining Structure (and Sanity).
Another cornerstone of a successful implementation process is adherence. These tools don’t function if you aren’t using them. It’s very easy to fall behind as you’re churning out these responsibilities, especially when multiplied by frequent meetings and concurrent clients. There will come a point where you have a desktop full of meeting notes and no time outside of the meetings to actual sift through, read, and download the material.
So, how do you combat the fatigue and keep your resources up to date? Block off some time on your schedule for organization. Whether it’s an hour, or a Friday afternoon, use this dedicated time to collect your thoughts, catch up, read over your deliverable tracker, and build resources you’ve been needing or wanting to but haven’t had the time for.
You will find that stakeholders may slowly begin to rely on you to recount conversations, remind them of follow-up statuses, and begin to emphasize your part as a facilitator. “With great power comes great responsibility” – but seriously, the wheels only turn if you’re awake and alert at the wheel. Make sure you allow yourself enough time to digest all of the information and house it appropriately – in a manner that’s organized.
So, how do you combat the fatigue and keep your resources up to date? Block off some time on your schedule for organization. Whether it’s an hour, or a Friday afternoon, use this dedicated time to collect your thoughts, catch up, read over your deliverable tracker, and build resources you’ve been needing or wanting to but haven’t had the time for.
You will find that stakeholders may slowly begin to rely on you to recount conversations, remind them of follow-up statuses, and begin to emphasize your part as a facilitator. “With great power comes great responsibility” – but seriously, the wheels only turn if you’re awake and alert at the wheel. Make sure you allow yourself enough time to digest all of the information and house it appropriately – in a manner that’s organized.
Integrating Yourself with Your Customer.
The customer is king – especially in the beginning stages of your organization and implementation process’ life. It’s important to be adaptable and communicate this to your teams. Set the precedent that you will need to be agile and, as your company grows, processes will eventually become more cemented.
With this in mind, different organizations leverage different technologies, and, if your company relies on customer data, metrics, or the sharing of information between parties, you may need to become familiar with these applications that are already essential pieces of your customer’s workflow. For us, this involves having accounts and actively working within customer tools. In our eyes, and as an adage for young organizations, inability to adopt customer preferences at an early stage will only hinder growth. So, how do we implement this outlook?
First, our superhero clinical team brings with them prior exposure to a diverse set of applications from varying practices. Therefore, when integrating into customer solutions, our teams, more likely than not, have experience working within these tools and their modules. What would be the recommendation for your organization? Hire a diverse set of experiences. A team with exposure to multiple solutions becomes a Swiss Army Knife – both able to help you compare and contrast the best applications for your organization, and provides confidence when operating with a range of customers (similar to that of being conversational in a foreign country’s tongue when traveling).
Second, implementation budgets time within our onboarding phases to allow for customer tool access and training. If it is necessary that your team functions within a new application, it is imperative that you account for a period whereby your team(s) will be granted access and provided sufficient training to effectively work within this new environment. Even if you are not fully ingrained in the application, but receive reports from a new application, let’s say, this best practice still stands – it’s never a bad idea to have a fundamental understanding of how your customer is receiving data, organizing it, and delivering it to you. It will only enhance understanding, collaboration, and strengthen the relationship.
With this in mind, different organizations leverage different technologies, and, if your company relies on customer data, metrics, or the sharing of information between parties, you may need to become familiar with these applications that are already essential pieces of your customer’s workflow. For us, this involves having accounts and actively working within customer tools. In our eyes, and as an adage for young organizations, inability to adopt customer preferences at an early stage will only hinder growth. So, how do we implement this outlook?
First, our superhero clinical team brings with them prior exposure to a diverse set of applications from varying practices. Therefore, when integrating into customer solutions, our teams, more likely than not, have experience working within these tools and their modules. What would be the recommendation for your organization? Hire a diverse set of experiences. A team with exposure to multiple solutions becomes a Swiss Army Knife – both able to help you compare and contrast the best applications for your organization, and provides confidence when operating with a range of customers (similar to that of being conversational in a foreign country’s tongue when traveling).
Second, implementation budgets time within our onboarding phases to allow for customer tool access and training. If it is necessary that your team functions within a new application, it is imperative that you account for a period whereby your team(s) will be granted access and provided sufficient training to effectively work within this new environment. Even if you are not fully ingrained in the application, but receive reports from a new application, let’s say, this best practice still stands – it’s never a bad idea to have a fundamental understanding of how your customer is receiving data, organizing it, and delivering it to you. It will only enhance understanding, collaboration, and strengthen the relationship.
About Alexi Papakyriacou: Alexi serves as Reimagine Care’s Senior Implementation and Project Manager (or, as he would say, Air Traffic Controller). Alexi leads our implementation and project management efforts, working to ensure a seamless onboarding process for our partners through organization, communication, and collaboration across internal and external teams.