Legacy Health is a non-profit hospital system with a total of approximately 14,000 employees across six hospitals located in Oregon and Washington states.
Amy Elias came to Legacy Health in 2017 to serve as the system’s Creative Projects & Systems Manager. After spending years at a Fortune 500 company where no project management tool was in place, she was excited that Legacy Health had invested in Workzone. There was one catch. Hardly anyone at Legacy Health was using it.
Amy became the Workzone champion. Her practical, methodical approach and collaboration with Workzone’s customer success team led to her team members having a different view of using Workzone. They soon began to see its value in improving their workflows and demonstrating the ROI of their team.
“Workzone has allowed us to show the work that we’re doing for each hospital and the system as a whole. We’ve made huge strides and it’s clicking for these team members. They now realize, ‘I want my work to show up on a report so the hospital president knows I’m working hard for them.”
Amy Elias, Creative Operations Manager
The Challenge
One of the main aspects of Amy’s role at Legacy Health was to be the subject matter expert on Workzone. Her challenge? Achieve buy-in and full adoption of Workzone throughout Legacy Health’s marketing and community relations departments.
Presented with a classic case of “It’s working, so why change it?” Amy knew that the opposite was true.
Lack of an established project management process resulted in:
- Inefficient processes wasting valuable time and assets
- Uncertainty about what projects and tasks teams are spending their time on
- Stakeholder communications were falling through the cracks
The Solution
This level of buy-in requires a cultural shift. Legacy Health had the advantage of a new CEO with a visionary view of leadership; she understood that collaborative use of a project management platform like Workzone had the potential for system-wide positive transformative change.
Amy planned to tackle one area at a time, using Workzone to manage the projects of her 35-person team in the community relations and marketing department. She recommends starting with easy, bare-bones tasks.
She shared that, “It’s all about starting that routine and setting the expectation that you need to update the system. Once people became comfortable with it, we were able to build on that, adding dependencies and using the platform more completely.”
The challenges Legacy Health was facing demonstrate the value of Workzone’s customer success teams. Amy worked with Workzone’s Director of Customer Success, Alex, whose team plays a key role in helping teams adopt new project management habits for the long term. Together they created a plan, discussed customizations that provided instant ease of use, and tackled roadblocks along the way. When Amy would experience pushback from her team, she shared:
“Talking to Alex, he was always really good at giving the framework as to how to change those perceptions. I have a partner. I don’t think we would have gotten to where we are without Alex.”
– Amy Elias, Creative Operations Manager
Another way Legacy Health was able to gain team buy-in was to use Workzone’s project dashboard as their guide during every production meeting.
Every Thursday the project leads, writers, designers, and web specialists meet to review workloads and discuss hurdles they might be facing, making sure everyone has the information they need for their projects.
Workzone’s capabilities have brought meaningful bottom-line value to Legacy Health by providing:
- A central hub for documents and communications
- At-a-glance status updates on projects
- Metrics and reporting to evaluate best practices, ROI, and keep leadership and stakeholders informed and onboard
When Workzone is used as the single source of truth for project management, allowing team members to see where project priorities lie, where everyone is spending their time, manage requests and approvals from other departments, and collaborate globally, they’re more likely to understand and appreciate how important it is for them to fully embrace use of the system.
Outcomes
Using Workzone, Legacy Health has gained a project management partner and a problem-solver. Increased adoption of Workzone throughout the system has resulted in:
- Removing silos, creating an overall workflow and efficiencies
- Ability to see all projects in motion, preventing problems from escalating
- A big picture view of all activities, providing insight into where new needs arise
Centralized communication was one of the initial hurdles Legacy Health addressed. One significant problem they faced was that they were dealing with hundreds of orders from multiple vendors and departments.
Amy shares an example:
“We got a call from a client saying, ‘You made a mistake.’ They had received 500 more posters than they were expecting, and they were unhappy about the added cost. At the time of the call, the project lead was in the video studio overseeing production, and we didn’t want to interrupt him. Before Workzone, we would have had to pull him out of the studio to double-check the details.
But with the Workzone systems in place, we were able to look at the original requests, see what was actually sent over to the vendor, and look at the order acknowledgment and determine that no, we had not made the error. So, what would have been a ‘fire drill’ before was resolved in 15 minutes thanks to the records available to us in Workzone.”
Takeaways
When you choose Workzone, you get a partner invested in your success. Any project management platform can offer similar task management processes; we provide:
- A partner to guide you through process change
- A single source of truth to see progress in real-time
- Proven value to stakeholders
Amy’s team is experiencing this firsthand: “My team is now a resource for the other teams in our system. They are the evangelists, helping us drive home that using Workzone is helping to show their value. It’s having a ripple effect through our organization and leadership is seeing it.”
Are you looking for a project management platform that will transform your work processes into efficient, problem-solving, value-proving vehicles? Then it’s time to request a Workzone demo.
