The Importance of Project Management

Dear Reader,

Lest there be misunderstanding, allow me to clarify that when I wrote

"To sacrifice medical science on the altar of project management is a form of human sacrifice"

I in no way meant to imply that project management is not needed with VISTA. On the contrary, the effectiveness of the project management seems to correlate directly with the odds of success in the last decade of projects to install VISTA outside the federal government.

High-quality VISTA-project managers seem to be among the rarest of the rare specialties in increasing demand as the expertise bottleneck gets a good grip on the community.

A great deal of what I'll be writing about in the weeks ahead assumes and depends upon a solid project-management foundation for the lifecycle to succeed.

Rather, what I meant is that within the VISTA-software lifecycle, project management must serve medical science, not attempt to dictate terms to it. Just as the approach to software development must be adjusted to be compatible with the complexity and flow of medical science, so too must project management.

To do otherwise, for example to prioritize deadlines over medical correctness, is literally to endanger our patients. There has been a great deal too much worship of timelines in VISTA management over the last fifteen years, and the health of our patients and of the software that supports them has suffered.

Replacing that kind of poor-quality, mechanical project management with experienced, fluent, and well-adapted project management is one of the major steps in launching this new VISTA renaissance.

Yours truly,
Rick