Discussion of the Atrium Hospital Project Scope

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The central goal of this business project is to ensure that the Atrium Hospital makes the most efficient and optimal transition to its new electronic charting system, EPIC, which allows for scalable operations. This goal focuses on improving the Atrium’s operational performance while reducing potential errors and critical vulnerabilities that could be dangerous to hospital management. In particular, it is well known that the migration of automated intravenous pump management is associated with risks of system failure or errors, so the Atrium Hospital needs to consider all possible threats and carefully plan the transition properly. For this purpose, there is a concept of scope in business projects, which helps to summarize and, at the same time, narrow down the idea of the project. For example, the project scope is as detailed a description as possible of all project-related characteristics, which includes not only a precise goal and objective but also a summary of how stakeholders will invest money and evaluate results, as well as aspects of budget, time, resources, and results (Alexander, 2020). In other words, when looking at a project scope statement, decision-makers should not have additional questions or misunderstandings about precisely what the Atrium plans to do.

Critical components of any project scope statement are the unfolding of the plan over time to form an understanding of the overall vector of development and the influences that stakeholders have at each stage. For example, in the case of the Atrium Hospital, the primary success factor for maximizing results is the practical setup of the EPIC system, which depends primarily on, but is not determined by, network administrators and engineers alone. In addition, the scope of the project should include a critical review of what constraints and barriers the implementation may encounter during development. Such obstacles can obviously affect the overall outcome, so there is a need to carefully examine them and develop strategic and tactical responses to them. Careful time and budget planning are also critical milestones of the scope statement because they actually frame the project and show what the time and resource limits are and how to achieve them. If such planning is abandoned, not only are significant delays expected in implementing the transition to EPIC but budget overruns as well. Clearly, such outcomes are not acceptable for the Atrium Hospital, as they could lead to undesirable consequences associated with a drop in automated intravenous pump operability.

However, in the scope of the project, there is also a need to evaluate the potential outputs to form an idea of what kind of results will be presented to the customer. This includes understanding how to visualize these results — whether they will be tables, graphs, or text reports (Armstrong, 2020). For the Atrium Hospital as a customer, there is a need to get as detailed and accurate results as possible, so using multiple ways to present them at once is an appropriate strategy. For example, graphs can be used to measure the sensitivity of the new EPIC system to intravenous pump performance. The scope of the project also needs to validate strictly what tools will be used to measure success. For this reason, the goal should be postulated as precisely and mechanically as possible since “migrating the Atrium hospital electronic chart system to EPIC” is an abstract task for which it is difficult to measure performance. Instead, specific measures used to measure success need qualitatively or quantitatively to be described. For the Atrium, this could be conducting independent control tests to audit the compatibility of the new EPIC system with intravenous pump performance as a quantitative measure and measuring the system’s maximum failure rate as a quantitative measure (Kirvan, 2021). It is expected that the characteristics listed above will be fully and comprehensively described in the Atrium Hospital project scope statement to avoid any ambiguity and uncertainty in the implementation of the goal. In this sense, the most difficult step may be the discussion of the measures used to accurately assess effectiveness since further clinical practice, which includes financial and reputational risks, directly depends on this step.