Video Tip: Project Management at Arnold Palmer Hospital

From talking to OM professors around the country, I have found that the 7 video case studies dealing with Arnold Palmer Hospital for Women and Children are probably the most popular in the video series we created for you to show in class. The other videos cover Hard Rock, Frito-Lay, Wheeled Coach Ambulance, Regal Marine, and Darden Restaurants. (But wait till you see what we have in store for the next edition of our OM texts: an inside look at OM in an NBA team!)

If you teach Project Management (Ch.3) in your course, here is a great 8.5 minute video to show– with a case full of real data to assign. Some of the points to make with the building of  the new 11 story Arnold Palmer Hospital addition are: (1) planning took place for over a year before the first dirt was shoveled; (2) there were a thousand plus meetings  to allow doctors, nurses, patients, staff, and others have a say in what the new facility should look like; (3) a warehouse a mile away was turned into a mock floor of the hospital so visitors could walk in and evaluate the placement of beds, bathrooms, windows, and even electrical outlets; and (4) MS Project was used to manage the whole project.

This latter point is important. In today’s weak job market, I encourage students to take advantage of the copies of MS Project (full-blown, but time-limited) that Pearson-Prentice Hall  provides with our book. Included is a self-paced tutorial , which together with the printouts at the end of Ch.3, can help students master this useful software–and beef up their resumes at the same time. You might even give extra credit to a student who solves the case study using MS Project, as opposed to using Excel OM or POM for Windows, the other free programs that come with the text.