Downstate Medical Center’s Case: No Time for Strategizing
Strategic planning is very important for the success of health services organizations and health systems. These organizations have to have elaborated strategic plans to help them to deal with changes and challenges in the future. Developing these strategies is the responsibility of the CEO and the boards of these organizations. The board and the CEO are responsible for giving the organization its direction. They are the ones who dictate where the organization is headed.
This will therefore help in developing the strategic plan for getting there. The strategies for achieving the objectives of the business are created by senior management. The CEO’s role is to also guide and foresee the creation of these organizational-strategies.
In Downstate things were going well and the organization was progressing perfe3ctly but there was still a need for strategizing. This is because strategizing has various benefits to an organization. First of all, having a strategy helps you to be prepared for the future. Even though Downstate is presently doing well that may not be the case a few years to come because all of the factors may change. Downstate, therefore, needs to have a strategy so that they can be prepared for any challenges or changes in the future.
Strategizing involves planning. Planning reduces uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk. By anticipating trends and things that influence the environment such as public policy, managers can respond to them appropriately. Having strategies helps an organization to achieve equilibrium between itself and the external environment. Strategies determine how an organization will be able to sustain its relationship with the external environment. Strategizing is also important to Downstate as it determines how the organization will be able to achieve its goals.
For the CEO and the board chairperson, if they want to start strategizing for their organization they should start from the beginning. Situational analysis is the heart of strategizing and Downstate Medical Centre should therefore start from this point. It essentially involves gathering and evaluating information from the past and the present and using that information to make assumptions of the future. Situational analysis is informed by both the external environment and internal environment.
Through situational analysis Downstate Medical Centre will be able to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (also called the SWOT analysis) as well as risks, issues, and deficiencies. This stage will be able to give the organization a lot of information that will help them to proceed to the next steps of strategizing. Downstate will be able to develop strategies to help them operate smoothly in the future that they have forecasted using this information.
HMO Inc.’s Case: A Response to Change
In conducting the system analysis, the whole organization should be properly briefed and ready for it. In the case of Group HMO Inc., the clerical and secretarial staff may have not been properly prepared for the systems analysis by outsiders and therefore they did not make the change well. The reactions to the study may have been caused by intimidation. The secretarial and clerical staff of the organization may have been intimidated by having outsiders observe their operation for two days.
They may have been afraid that the observers would discover inconsistencies in their work or poor work quality. The staff may also have lacked adequate knowledge of the purpose of the study. This is caused by a lack of preparation on the management side. If the staff never understood why they were being observed it would have led to the staff feeling uncomfortable in the working environment and this is probably why they decided to miss work.
This reaction may have been predicted by the management. The management would have been able to predict the reaction of the clerical and the secretarial staff since they knew how they operate. Most of the people probably reacted the way they did since they were afraid that they would be found out to not be competent in their work. The management would have been able to predict the reaction of the staff by looking at their performance.
The preparedness of the staff could also be used to predict the reaction to the study. If the staff was well prepared and had been briefed on what was going to happen: the steps of study and the importance of the study then the reaction would have probably been different than the one observed.
If the study failed, the business office manager Dana Smith would have been held responsible. She had to have a strategy to make sure it went on till the end. Therefore, Smith should take a couple of steps to ensure that the study gets back on track. She should have called the people who are absent and waited for them to report back to work. Then she should have taken time to explain to the staff the importance of the study to the organization and them.
Smith should have also given the outside analysts a chance to interact with the staff. This would ensure that the staffs are comfortable around the analysts and therefore they could conduct the study till the end.