Transforming Your Organization With Artemis

Competition, cost efficiency, stunning advances in technology and keeping up with customer demand are just some of the reasons organizations transform themselves. Whether an organization is overhauling its entire business model or just standing up a new office, having effective change management, project management and strategic communications plans help ensure a successful outcome.

Prosci defines change management as using a structured process (the ADKAR model) and set of tools to lead the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome. The greater the impact of the change on an organization’s workforce — such as significantly altering a company’s culture or affecting day-to-day operations — the greater the need for comprehensive change management. Project management, or the technical side of change, works together with change management for effective organizational transformation.

Executing a Transformational Strategic Plan

When the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Office of Nursing Services (ONS) needed help executing a 10-year strategic plan and creating a blueprint for a broader, organization-wide transformation, its leaders turned to the organizational transformation experts at Artemis. The ONS Nursing Workforce Strategic Plan ensures an innovative, world-class nursing workforce that would attract highly qualified nurses and build trust in VHA among Veterans, their families and caregivers.

The Artemis team helped VA clinicians and executives on a dozen, multidisciplinary workstreams implement the strategic plan to realize its four goals: optimizing nursing practice, strengthening and sustaining the nursing workforce, reimagining lifelong learning and career development and inspiring an industry-leading culture. The team, which supported a central Project Management Office, developed an overarching project management plan and one for each workstream. Team members also created internal processes and leadership briefing materials to keep executive-level stakeholders up to date.

“Once we got through the discovery process of who the change is going to impact, we created the process to implement that change, such as putting a communications plan in place, creating functional timelines and making sure anything we produced for ONS was done in a way to meet those timelines,” said Emily Richardella, program manager for the ONS contract at Artemis.

Communications products such as resource guides, toolkits and training, for example, helped nurses in the field understand and adapt to the plan’s strategic changes.

Transforming a Highly Complex Federal Health System

Adopting and implementing a new electronic health record (EHR) modernization (EHRM) system across VHA, the largest integrated health system in the country, requires major change management, issue management, project management and communications efforts.

Given the complexity and scope of VHA’s EHRM initiative — a multi-year undertaking that affects more than 9 million Veterans and VHA staff at more than 1,200 health facilities across the country — the effectiveness of these efforts is paramount to EHRM’s overall success.

Artemis helps redesign the EHRM issue management strategy, develop an integrated, comprehensive EHRM communications strategy and executive-level plan to maintain consistent messaging and visibility, and manage more than 30 individual projects contributing to the success of federal EHR deployment.

“Our communications team does a lot of stakeholder review and evaluation to make sure we have a handle on what issues or information audiences need to hear about,” said Jillian Gates, communication and stakeholder engagement lead for the EHRM contract at Artemis. “We function as a SAFe Agile communications team, making sure we’re not siloed and that we’re working across workstreams, but our communications process is rooted in change management and the ADKAR model.”

The Artemis team is helping to stand up the VHA Office of Health Informatics Client Portfolio Management Office (CPMO) and support the transition of the EHR National Councils from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to VHA. CPMO supports and oversees EHRM activities, including designing decision-making processes tailored to stakeholder needs, supporting the National Councils and overseeing projects and programs essential for successful EHR deployment.

Using Prosci change management principles, the team evaluates change readiness, provides change management tools and creates resources to support end-user adoption.

“Our team creates change management plans for any changes that occur under CPMO,” said Caitlin Moore, a manager and change management professional at Artemis. “We work through the change management approach, the team incorporates the change management plans into its work and, once the change is implemented, we identify lessons learned.”

The team also develops change management knowledge-building sessions, resistance training and weekly change management tips to support CPMO’s change efforts.