‘Integrating Project Management Office and Organisational Change Management Processes for Better Implementation and Adoption of E-Health Strategy in Saudi Arabia’

Abstract

Abstract

In the last decade, competition has been fierce among various organisations towards achieving the highest standard in productivity and optimal level of services by keeping pace with creative technologies for more efficient and effective performance. Effective management brings about adaptive change and adds more value to a project’s execution through suitable strategic planning, i.e., encompassing various programs and initiatives that expound where the organisations want to be, what it needs, and when and how to achieve this. Needless to say, any organisation can encounter difficulties in the implementation of its strategy due to internal or external factors such as lack of coordination among stakeholders, low quality of IT strategy, deficiency in IT strategy awareness, etc. that may result in extra significant costs, time waste and poor deliverables. In its pursuit to fulfill the 2030 vision, the ICT department at the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH) began to digitize health services provided to health facilities, hospitals, and health centres throughout the country within the coming 10 years where patients will have access to their medical records, and the medical staff will exchange information about patients effectively and efficiently anywhere and anytime throughout KSA (MOH, 2020). However, due to certain barriers, the ICT department encountered difficulties in implementing the e-health strategy on time and deliver it nationwide, which resulted in cancelled projects, completed but inoperative projects, or over-cost projects with several inactive features. Since IT projects require a unique and holistic approach as they are more complex and involve continuous collaboration between project team members, end users and management, the research hypothesized that this failure in implementation is attributed to lack of coordination among organisational units that influence the organisation’s overall performance and impact the projects’ deliverables. The PMO and the OCM are the key organisational units that initiate and follow up implementation from the very beginning to the very end, i.e., delivering projects to end users. It was considered that through unifying the efforts of these two units, the organisation can improve their efforts and bring efficacy to its Project Management (PjM) or Program Management (PgM) and deliver the expected benefits. The research developed five cases studies; namely the Strategic Implementation Office (SIO); Project Management Office (PMO); Organisational Change Management (OCM); Program Management (PgM); and Business Owners (BOs)] across four major e-health programs: Health Information System (HIS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Picture and Archiving Communication System (PACS), and Infrastructure and Data Centres (IDCs) which he selected as the scope for his research. The five main questions of this research are to (1) identify the relationship between the PMO and OCM, (2) discover the barriers and business drivers for integrating the PMO and OCM in implementing e-health strategy in Saudi Arabia, (3) determine the considerations that health institutions should make regarding the PMO and OCM processes for achieving the e-health strategy, (4) illustrate how the integration of the PMO and OCM help in better implementation and adoption of e-health strategy, (5) identify how the integration of the PMO and OCM drives adoption of implementation of e-health and overcome barriers hindering its implementation. Accordingly, the research uses the descriptive paradigm, case studies, and qualitative method to explore the relations between the PMO and OCM to coordinate and integrate their roles, prevent duplication in their tasks and responsibilities, come up with and validate the conceptual model of this integration.