Baude, Lydia A.

Strategic projects in large healthcare organisations are often highly complex and dynamic, and they require a team of skilled business professionals to execute them. Examples of difficult, costly and extended project executions have been shared in the literature. Successful project execution involves many critical facets. One facet that continues to be of marked interest is effective resourcing of strategic projects. This paper focuses on describing a staffing approach used at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) to facilitate successful, agile and sustainable execution, with desired outcomes. In 2016, Management Engineering & Consulting (ME&C) began exploring a collaborative staffing model that partnered management engineers with project managers (PMs) to drive strategic, multisite projects. This ongoing collaboration model was evaluated from multiple perspectives, including project outcomes, timeliness, client and staff satisfaction and opportunities for innovation. Data and feedback on the model were collected with historical reports, surveys and focus groups with stakeholders, leaders, PMs and management engineers. The feedback and data indicated that the collaborative staffing strategy and model have further optimised service delivery, enabled professional staff to work at the highest level of their competency and dynamically blended knowledge, expertise and skills to achieve better and more sustainable overall project outcomes.