Next Saturday, I'll be leaving LA to spend a week in Accra, Ghana. This is part of my AMR (Applied Management Research) project, about which I have previously posted. As a refresher, or if this is the first of my posts you have read, I'm working with a team of four other second-year students on a consulting project for a hospital in Accra called Korle Bu. We are working specifically with the surgical department, with the goal of our project being to improve the efficiency of the operating theater.
We originally thought this would be a simple "process flow" analysis, where we would try to find the bottleneck in the surgical process and then come up with a solution for how to relieve the bottleneck. If you're interested in learning a little more about what I'm talking about, visit the webpage of Anderson's Operations Department. Or, try reading this -- it's a novel that is, believe it or not, required reading for the core operations class at Anderson.
When half of our team visited Accra in November, they discovered that there were too many variabilities in the the daily operations of the surgical department at Korle Bu for us to use a simple process flow tool. Although we were frustrated at the time, in retrospect it was a great educational experience for us to be forced to think (way) outside the box. In fact, this hiccup led to a much more complex and comprehensive solution to the surgical department's problem. Although operational analyses remain at the core of our recommendations, we layered human resources over that core, designing a complete and comprehensive performance management process that will allow the department to continually improve in the coming months and years.
