Modern Management Methods: Lean Kanban North America 2014

A very large proportion of complex capital projects fail. They either exceed the budget they were funded at, open after they were supposed to, were scaled back and compromised from what was promised at the outset, or some combination of all three.  So how do you look your Board, your Venture Capitalist, City Mayor  or simply your Boss, in the eye and, without blinking, say “Don’t’ worry, my capital project will be just fine”?  You do it by committing to delivering what was promised and throw away all the processes that don’t align with that commitment. You do it by importing processes from outside, and creating processes from scratch that do align with it.  It’s easy to do when you’re given the autonomy to do it.  This very rarely happens, but it happened at Sutter Health. And it is working. The $320MM Sutter Health Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, California opened under budget and ahead of schedule, and those processes are now being taken to the $2B Sutter Health Van Ness & Geary Campus hospital in San Francisco. I will discuss what changed at Sutter in how we budget, contract, and plan work and how that change connected directly to success.