PRJM6000 Assignment 1: Analysis of PathWest LIS Replacement Project

This assignment analyzes the PathWest Laboratory Information System (LIS) replacement project. Part A justifies the project's characteristics as a project, supported by definitions, and explains the beneficial changes and deliverables. Part B assesses project management knowledge areas, including project integration, scope, and time management, and how they could have been applied to the PathWest project to mitigate delays and risks. The assignment uses the Western Australian Auditor General’s Report on the project as a primary source, along with additional academic references to support its analysis of project management concepts and their practical application in the context of the PathWest LIS project.

PRJM6000 Assignment 1 [Last Name, First Name]
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Part A
I. Justification of the project
PathWest is an organization that works within the field of health sector to provision with varied
services of pathology to the public health system that exists within the State. The enterprise has a
collective number of 50 centres for collection, 5 hospital laboratories for teaching as well as 23
branch laboratories. In addition to this, the company carries out a collective amount of 16 million
and more tests all the year round (Petrides et al., 2017 9-16). However, for carrying out all the
collective services with additional stability, security, assurance and efficiency the company needs to
build a Laboratory Information System. The information system should have the collective ability to
track orders, prepare as well as deliver reports along with tracking of the specimens. The
information system will also perform the activity of managing the payment section for the company
in regards to the customers.
There was a prior existence of a laboratory information system that had the primary
inclusion of some activities, and it was termed as ULTRA. However, the existing system had the
primary lacking of some activities that it could not perform. As a reason, in the year of 2014-15 the
government had sanctioned the plan of replacing ULTRA with the new LIS to meet the primary
requirements of PathWest (Guo et al., 2016). The organization had the prior expectation that the
system will be in operation by May 2018. However, some of the factors had led to the delay of the
project and prevented the same from going live. This had compelled the NMHS Board as well as the
DOH to review along with that of asses the financial situation associated with the project.
This review had allowed the project with an additional 12 months to complete the entire
system and prepare it for functioning at a cost of $734,000. In regards to the system, PathWest used
to operate as a primary part of NMHS, but established as a separate Health Service Provider (HSP) by
the end of the tenure.
The LIS was taken up as a project since the out-dated ULTRA was having the capability to
meet the primary needs of the company. However, it failed to meet some of the specific objectives
of the company that led to the idea of replacing the entire system with the new laboratory
information system that will fulfil all the other needs of the company that ULTRA failed to
accomplish (Paszko, Christine and Christine Turner, 2018). In addition to this, this project also had
some of the associated risks such as risk related to vendor support along with a potential system
failure of the same.
II. Project Description
The project was primarily undertaken to replace the existing LIS named ULTRA, and to introduce a
new LIS to fulfil all the primary needs of the PathWest organization to meet the demands of the
clients as well as to have a business growth within the field of pathology (Duelli et al., 361-379 2018).
II.a
The primary deliverables that the LIS will provision the organization with are,
i) The clients will have the provision to order for variously existing tests that occur within
the field of healthcare in regards to the human health (Bendou et al., 2017 116-120).
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PRJM6000 Assignment 1 [Last Name, First Name]
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ii) The company will get hold of a helping hand from the LIS for tracking of various
specimens that have a direct relation with the tests that will be carried out within the
organization.
iii) After the tests have been performed, the LIS will explicitly help the organization to
prepare as well as deliver the reports through an online procedure to the clients.
iv) Lastly, the system will also carry out the management of all the billings in regards to the
tests that the clients have carried out with the help of the organisation.
II.b
The LIS has been addressed to improve the current situation of the PathWest organization. The
organization is a pathology department that has been working within the field of medics for a long
time and has been serving the customers with multiple processes related to their health. Having the
possession of 50 centres for collection, 5 teaching hospitals as well as 23 branch laboratories, the
organization made use of the previously existing LIS named ULTRA to fulfil the primary objectives of
the organization (Yusof, Maryati and Azila Arifin, 2016 766-773). However, due to the failure of the
system, the new LIS has been undertaken to be developed and accomplish the other objectives of
the organization.
All of the deliverables primarily helps the organization to achieve the objectives for which
the organization primarily carries out all of the activities within the field of business in terms of
generating revenue and keeping the society healthy.
Part B
I. Assessment of knowledge areas
The primary knowledge areas of project management that can be considered have been mentioned
below.
Project Integration Management
This particular knowledge area has the primary inclusion of holding the overall project
together as well as integrating all the resources that are needed for undertaking the project and
accomplishing the same (Tang et al., 2018 545-549). The activities that are included within this
knowledge area are,
i) Developing of the project charter- this is one of the phases during the initiation of the
project where the project charter is developed and the authorization from the project
manager is gained.
ii) Developing the project management plan- this refers to the primary document acting as
a guidance meant for the project manager as well as the ending of the planning phase in
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PRJM6000 Assignment 1 [Last Name, First Name]
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regards to the project that has been undertaken. This step is for ensuring that the
outcome related to the project is successful.
iii) Directing as well as managing the project work- this step is meant for producing the
deliverables related to the project.
iv) Monitoring as well as controlling the project work- this particular procedure consists of
the work that is a necessity for monitoring over the project to ensure that all the
resources are properly used for getting hold of a successful outcome (Cheng et al., 2017
473-481).
v) Performing an integrated change control- within this particular procedure, the
controlling of change is carried out.
vi) Closing phase- refers to that particular step where the project attains the closure as well
as the other phases of the project.
Project Scope Management
This particular knowledge area has complete dependency upon the scope that is related to
the project. The work includes the gathering of all the primary objectives that are included within
the project. This knowledge area also highlights the detailed requirement that is specifically required
for delivering the final product to the client or the owner of the project with successful outcomes.
This has the primary requirement of defining a proper scope within the scope statement. In
addition to this, the work breakdown structure following which the entire project will be undertaken
as well as individual steps shall be measured is well-defined within this particular knowledge area
relative to any individual project (Varajão, Colomo-Palacios & Silva, 2017 216-222). The work
breakdown structure acts as a primary helping hand or contributor towards attaining the success in
regards to the scope that has a direct relation to the undertaken project.
The validation of the scope puts forward the importance in regards to the project that the
stakeholders or the owner of the project on a regular basis approves the deliverables in relation to
the project. This specifically takes place during the procedure of monitoring as well as controlling the
process groups along with the accepting of deliverables. However, this also states that the project
that has been undertaken should always abide by the schedule that has been initially stated. Going
against this can result in the change of the scope that relates directly to the project of the company.
Project Time Management
The time management of a project is considered to be time consuming on a different level
when a particular project has been undertaken where the timeframe has already been set
beforehand. In this knowledge area, the project is divided into multiple tasks that have been
scheduled with start dates as well as deadlines (El Yamami et al., 1-6 2018). This also takes into
consideration the budget that is associated with the undertaken project. In addition to this, this
knowledge area also highlights the activity of revising over various phases on a daily basis that might
be constantly changing with the increasing timeframe of an undertaken project.
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PRJM6000 Assignment 1 [Last Name, First Name]
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This knowledge area has the primary inclusion of planning as well as managing the schedule,
having the necessary involvement of creating a particular schedule belonging to a respective project.
This also includes the determining of the particular individual who shall be held responsible for
everything that takes place within a particular project. This particularly means putting forward the
definition of various activities and has no relation with the work breakdown structure but is
considered to be similar.
With the help of this knowledge area, the various task that are carried out within a project
are placed in an ordered sequence and all the resources that are required for every individual task is
estimated as well as assigned to carry out that particular activity with ease. In addition to this, the
duration for which every individual task shall be carried out is also determined (Gonçalves et al.,
2017 143-150). This will specifically lead to a proper management of all the subtasks that form a
primary component within a project and all such activities will be carried out in an efficient manner
with the help of this schedule that will be prepared within this particular phase of the project.
II.
Firstly, the project integration management could have been applied to the PathWest project in the
multiple ways. The entire project for developing the LIS for the PathWest organization was approved
by the government and later on, was assessed on financial terms by the NMHS and the DoH together
to successfully implement the new laboratory information system for replacing the existing one
(Hwang et al., 2018 1-13). However, for a proper undergoing of the project along with a constant
monitoring of the same to mitigate the delay, a project team should have been allotted to carry out
all the activities on a daily basis.
Secondly, project scope management has the primary activity of defining the scope and
abiding by the same to get hold of positive outcomes at the end of a project (Nguyen et al., 2017
04016025). The PathWest project had the primary objective of replacing the existing LIS named
ULTRA with a new LIS that will help the organization to fulfil all the needs of the company for the
growth of business. However, it had been seen that at some point of time due to the delay of the
project various risks associated to vendor support as well as project failure possibilities had come
into existence (Haass, Omid and Neda Azizi, 2019 171-197). This could have been dealt in a proper
manner if the initial objective that had been laid down at the starting of the project was abided by
and the work breakdown structure had been followed to mitigate the delay that had taken place.
Lastly, project time management refers to following a proper schedule for accomplishing
the outcomes of a project within the set timeframe of the project. In regards to the PathWest
project, the system was estimated to get live by May 2018. However, the project was delayed due to
various reasons as well as financial issues that had delayed the project start-off date to April 2020
(Gonçalves, Rafael Queiroz and Christiane Gresse Von Wangenheim, 2016 46-55). This could have
been avoided in regards to this knowledge area by following a proper work breakdown structure as
well as a proper schedule to carry out individual tasks on the basis of the schedule and particularly to
avoid the delay in association to the completion of the laboratory information system.
References
Petrides, Athena K., Milenko J. Tanasijevic, Ellen M. Goonan, Adam B. Landman, Michalis Kantartjis,
David W. Bates, and Stacy EF Melanson. "Top ten challenges when interfacing a laboratory
information system to an electronic health record: Experience at a large academic medical center."
International journal of medical informatics 106 (2017): 9-16.
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Guo, Huazhang, Joe Birsa, Navid Farahani, Douglas J. Hartman, Anthony Piccoli, Matthew O’Leary,
Jeffrey McHugh et al. "Digital pathology and anatomic pathology laboratory information system
integration to support digital pathology sign-out." Journal of pathology informatics 7 (2016).
Paszko, Christine, and Christine Turner. Laboratory information management systems. CRC press,
2018.
Duelli, Christoph, Robert Keller, Jonas Manderscheid, Andreas Manntz, Maximilian Röglinger, and
Marco Schmidt. "Enabling Flexible Laboratory Processes: Designing the Laboratory Information
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Bendou, Hocine, Lunga Sizani, Tim Reid, Carmen Swanepoel, Toluwaleke Ademuyiwa, Roxana
Merino-Martinez, Heimo Meuller, Akin Abayomi, and Alan Christoffels. "Baobab laboratory
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Gonçalves, Rafael Queiroz, and Christiane Gresse Von Wangenheim. "An instructional unit for
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