4 Critical Red Flags in Healthcare Software Development: Navigating and Overcoming Project Delays
Navigating the intricate realm of healthcare software development, CEOs face a unique set of challenges that demand a precise understanding of the importance of timely project delivery. Picture the stakes: a groundbreaking diagnostic tool or patient management system delayed in release, each day withholding an opportunity to revolutionize diagnostics and enhance patient outcomes. Beyond the immediate impact on healthcare delivery efficiency, timely releases convey a powerful message to the board and investors—an affirmation that founders possess a visionary idea and a viable product.
Sign 1: Inadequate Project Planning
A strategic project plan is the foundation for aligning organizational goals, user expectations, and regulatory requirements. Warning signs of inadequate planning include unclear project objectives, inconsistent timelines, missed deadlines, and ambiguity in resource allocation. Regular project reevaluation, a Vitamin Software best practice, ensures continuous alignment, preventing the need for major plan overhauls down the line.
A viable project plan should be a strategic blueprint reflecting the healthcare software product's business goals and vision. When the project plan is adequately set up and implemented, it allows for aligning organizational goals, user expectations, and regulatory requirements.
Unclear project objectives, inconsistent timelines, frequently missed or moved deadlines, and a lack of clarity in resource allocation are significant indicators that a project plan put in place needs a health check.
What we’ve noticed with the companies that only work with their internal team or are supported by the staffing agencies is that they don’t have enough resources to step aside and look at their project objectively frequently enough. One of our team's favorite things is knowledge sharing, which helps elevate the project management methodology, development skills, and regulatory understanding of the entire organization to a greater level.
Sign 2: Lack of Clear Communication
All stakeholders should be able to see the project's progress at any given moment and clearly understand it. However, that is rare in practice. The board members and executives often say the reports feel like noise with a lot of data but need a structure to understand and make business decisions. The engineering team usually feels unsupported by the business-oriented side of the team. That back and forth usually happens for months when the team alarms them that they will miss the project deadline.
What the Vitamin Software team has developed from our experience of partnering with healthcare SaaS startups is that a concise reporting methodology can help guide better decision-making on both ends, enable productive conversations, and save resources in both revenue, time, and nerves. To learn more about how to translate engineering and scientific reports to your board of directors, you can read our blog - Bridge the Gap: Translating Technical Speak for Boardroom Success in Health Tech.
Explicit goals and transparent communication are crucial for project success. Cumbersome reports, often laden with technical jargon, can create a disconnect between engineering teams and the business-oriented side of the organization. To bridge this gap, our team advocates for concise reporting methodologies that facilitate productive conversations, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions.
Sign 3: Unanticipated Technical Challenges
The dynamic landscape of healthcare software brings forth unforeseen challenges like interoperability issues and evolving regulatory requirements. Recognizing red flags during the Sanity Check phase, such as abrupt shifts in timelines and roadblocks in data integration, allows for timely course correction, ensuring project deliverables stay on schedule.
The most common red flags our team identifies in the Sanity Check phase of qualifying if a project is a good fit for us are abrupt shifts in the project timeline, unplanned roadblocks in data integration, and a general sense of vagueness when trying to identify the root cause of the issues.
Recognizing these signs sooner rather than later allows our team to course-correct the project deliverables on the scheduled timeline.
Sign 4: Resource Waste
Imagine a team of talented developers that could be more utilized due to inadequate planning, resulting in duplicated efforts and untapped technologies. This not only wastes human capital but also stifles innovation. Open communication and a proactive approach to project health checks are instrumental in preventing resource waste fostering a culture that maximizes the potential of available resources. Just think about the tech stack yearly subscriptions your company invests in, even worse if you’ve acquired cutting-edge hardware solutions that are still waiting to be utilized after the product launch. These resources, intended to catalyze progress, must catch up in underutilization.
The Vitamin Software Approach
We spend your money wisely - this is one of the most resonating statements we share with our clients. Bottlenecks in communication channels lead to ripple effects across an organization's whole department or branch. They are often accompanied by different stages of burnout within the engineering team, which gets pushed under the rug due to the urgency of missing another deadline.
A culture of open communication is not the newest tech solution, but it is something organizations fail to do as they achieve different levels of operational growth. Teams need help implementing it while juggling all the other daily job requirements. Practicing healthy communicational habits, empowering individuals to speak up, creating constructive friction, and resolving it across different departments are critical factors in preventing resource waste. Support that with regular project health checks, and you’ll see a dramatic shift in your performance.
The Vitamin Software Approach in Practice
Facing challenges in launching an innovative patient-pharmacist app, our client, a leader in digital pharmacy solutions, turned to us for expertise. Hindered by budget constraints and a critical launch date, we’ve suggested that the best approach to meeting the deadline and staying within the budget is to prioritize between 100 user stories. Choosing Vitamin for our track record in cost predictability, we strategically addressed challenges, focusing on key stories. Our senior project managers and engineers meticulously analyzed each story to classify them based on completion, utility value, user experience functionality, and price. The results: meeting launch deadlines, saving $500K+, and delivering a transformative app that improves patient outcomes and healthcare workers' productivity. Click here to review the complete case study.
Avoid Release Delays and Budget Overflows in Your Organization
Recognizing signs of potential delays and addressing them with precision is vital. In collaboration with Vitamin Software, with its extensive experience managing over $100M in revenue for healthcare startups, CEOs can enhance their project's cost efficiency and ensure a successful digital transformation.
Recognize warning signs early, course-correct with our expertise, and save resources.
