Trinity Health Resource Planning Tool

Consulting with the Learning Function Leads to Award-Winning Project.

2010 Central Indiana ATD Best in Class Award Winner — Managing the Learning Function

Since Trinity Health System, the fourth-largest Catholic health care system in the country, became a client of Innovative Learning Group (ILG), it has contracted ILG to work on projects related to business acumen, coaching, service excellence, and project management for two different Trinity Health learning functions. The latest project was to consult with the company’s information services learning function.

Situation

Trinity Health’s Information Services Learning & Development (ISL&D) department needed to identify strategies to improve its resource capacity planning. Initially, Trinity Health was assigning staff to projects based on high-level conversations between managers and individuals. There was little data used during these conversations, and as a result, decisions regarding staffing were less than ideal.

ILG reviewed ISL&D’s documentation, conducted interviews with department leadership and core team members, and developed and prioritized 10 recommendations related to how the department was operating. ILG then created a tool to estimate the approximate hours per role that would be needed to complete an identified project. This innovative and unique estimating tool: 

• Provides task-level data in 15-minute increments by role 
• Provides built-in performance support 
• Prescribes the training development process for each delivery method 
• Includes formulas that calculate time based on productivity guidelines and industry-standard specifications 
• Includes suggestions for which role(s) should complete which task(s) 
• Enables team members to easily track their actual time spent per task and compare it to the time budgeted

Additionally, after collecting data from the estimating tool and understanding the project staffing assignments, education leads can easily enter the information into an existing database used to track project schedules and budgets.

Results

ISL&D can now estimate and track work at a much greater level of detail than is typical of most internal corporate training departments. 

Managers and staff can use data generated from the estimating tool to have more meaningful conversations and make better decisions. They can calculate a staff member’s utilization and determine whether or not he/she has time to successfully engage in a project. 

The effectiveness of the solution can be summarized as follows:

• Increased accountability for associates, promoting a sense of “I know what is expected of me in my job”
• Increased respect for one another’s roles, fostering productive conversations
• Improved confidence level of ISL&D associates 
• Improved resource capacity planning

ISL&D now functions more effectively and efficiently and provides improved service, both to internal customers and to end users (Trinity Health’s patients). 

To learn more about how Innovative Learning Group can create custom learning solutions to help improve business results, contact us at info@innovativeLG.com.

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