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SPANNING THREE DECADES OF VALUE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

DECEMBER 5, 2002

PART V: How to Build Blockbuster Value Teams

“ To Achieve Success in VM, New Team Models Are Mandatory.”

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Robert T. Yokl - President - The HCP Group, Ltd.

If your value management organizational architecture is still a value analysis committee or worse yet a products evaluation committee, then you have lost touch with the reality of the healthcare marketplace, which demands us to generate savings and quality gains faster, better, and more often than ever before.  Furthermore, if your value team(s) isn’t utilizing a Team-Based Project Management™ Model, then you are missing a gigantic opportunity to build blockbuster value teams by combining the philosophy, principles and practices of project management (the #5 and last ingredient in building blockbuster value teams) with the tenets of value management. 

Creating High Performance Value Teams

Establishing value teams alone will not bring about the dramatic results that your healthcare organization is envisioning in the 21^st century.  You can prepare your organization for change and train your value teams in the value methodologies, but if your don’t have the right people (with the right competencies), with the right process, looking at the right things – continuously, your value management program will fail to bring about dramatic results.  Value teams have unique characteristics, roles and structure to enable them to be effective in their sphere of influence.  They must be in alignment with your healthcare organization’s compensation policies and its culture. They will need to develop creative strategies to align themselves with your organization’s short and long-term vision, mission and goals and objectives.  Our answer to this challenge is the creation of Team-Based Project Management™ Model.  The TBPM is designed specifically for use as the vehicle to plan, organize, support, control, investigate, study and implement value analysis savings and quality improvement opportunities in a healthcare organization.

How The TBPM Model Works!

We have all sat through non-productive meetings (in fact, too many of our meetings could be categorized as such if we are honest with ourselves) and wondered how these meetings could be more effective and productive.  After studying the dynamics of value team meetings, it became evident to me the structure of today’s meetings and value analysis process is just too complex to be managed by just one person.  This was the genesis of the development of the TBPM model.  Under the TBPM model a Team Leader, Administrative Representative, Facilitator, and Recorder (collectively known as Team Leaders in the TBM Model) share the meeting and the value analysis leadership responsibilities.

In addition, every product, service or technology study that your value team(s) decides to pursue needs to be managed, from the Understanding Phase through the Execution Phase of the project, by a team member (Team Leaders are exempt from this responsibility) who is called a Project Manager.  It is the job of the Project Manager to mobilize and organize project work teams of customers, stakeholders and experts to perform specific value studies assigned to them by their Team Leaders, then coordinate their efforts and establish and verify timelines, verify on-going work and then submit written reports on the progress of their value studies to their value team(s) on an on-going basis.

The synergism of these two new value team organizational structures will give the needed boost in the performance of your value teams that is required to develop high performance value teams for your healthcare organization.

New Team Models Required For New Work

The time has passed when just about anything we try works, especially with the manage-ment of our value teams.  It’s now time to develop new team models for new work that is required of us due to the fact that healthcare organizations’ resources have become leaner and more time sensitive. That being said, it is now our responsibility to achieve value management success even with these constraints by building blockbuster value teams that follow the values, beliefs, processes, procedures and management style of successful project management teams to achieve value management success too.

Robert T. Yokl, President, The HCP Group, Ltd., has over 35 years of experience as a consultant and manager in the field of Supply/Value Chain Management and is one of the country's leading healthcare experts in value analysis, value engineering and materials management. He is the developer and program leader of the award winning Certified Value Analysis Practitioner Training Program™. Mr. Yokl is also the developer of the healthcare industry's leading ValueNetCentral™ Value Analysis Software. Over the past two decades he has trained thousands of healthcare managers in his patented Strategic Value Analysis™ and Team-Based Project Management™ processes and has assisted scores of organizations in developing their own value management programs. He has published six books, videos and audios on supply/value chain management. His latest book being, “ Strategic Value Analysis™: The #1 Smart Strategy for Taking Cost Out of a Healthcare Organizations’ Supply/Value Chain”.