The HSCNI’s Pat Davis outlines the impact Cora’s software has made, particularly in the area of financial management.
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Transcript
We supply 21 services to health and social care in Northern Ireland across 98 projects, across 116 cost centres, and those projects are divided into 24 Transformation projects, 14 growth projects, and 60 projects, concerned with the running of the current systems.
Looking at how we now deliver projects and programs compared to how you know it’s “black and white” and it was a nightmare because everything then would have had to have been done by spreadsheet and by-word reports; everybody had their own ideas as to how to properly deliver a project.
There was no real control over the finances – nobody knew where the money was going and how it was being spent. There was no regular reporting. We saw in Cora this ability to start small and then build to where we are now. This gives the individual project managers a single point of support for the implementation of the project and delivery. It also gives the people who are higher up the food chain, so to speak, at a program and at a portfolio level an instantaneous view across all of the 98 or so projects, as to where we are in them. It also allows issues and risks to be passed on up to the program and portfolio level if decisions need to be made. There’s automated reporting and there’s the linkage to the financial expenditure as well. Whenever an external audit was carried out or is carried out of any of our projects: there’s our governance, there’s our control mechanisms, there’s our risks and issues register. There’s all the critical documents and their approvals, and the stage approvals for the movement of the project moving forward.
Any PM can look at the guidance and the governance and see what they should be doing or what the issues they should be attending to at that point in project delivery. And then there’s the control at the programme level with regard to resource allocations, with regards to expenditures, and the bidding for future budgets. We can profile our budget; in other words, the allocations that we’re getting from Health and Social Care Northern Ireland, we can ask individual Project Managers to profile them for the future, their expenditures link those expenditures with product deliveries and then monitor the actual expenditure against the profiled expenditure and also against the budget allocations, the project and program delivery and they’re very happy that they get this snapshot once a quarter at Directorate and CEO level, of where we are with regards to the program of project delivery.
It places the emphasis on the individual to deliver as a Programme Manager or as somebody who is responsible and tying all of this together around resourcing it. It eases the burden on me. personally; I don’t have to go chasing the information – it is there for me to read. We can see where exactly our staff are being used.
If you’re a very mature organization with regard to project delivery Cora Systems can meet that. If you’re unsure or just starting off in the maturity pathway, it’s a very good entry. It is something that can start off simple and then get more complex and more sophisticated as your complexity and sophistication grows within the organization. I’m very pleased with the service that I get with Cora.
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