Medisys Corp.: the Intenscare Product Development Team

One of the major conflicts for the IntenseCare team was the challenge of cohesiveness among the leadership and managers as they tried to produce, launch and implement a new monitoring system for use in hospitals intensive care units that would collect data on patients to an electronic database.

IntensCare is a new medical system for monitoring intensive care patients and due to the project’s high profile and importance for the company, a new president, Art Beaumont, was hired to bring it to a successful completion. He believed that MediSys could beat the competition with speed to market by introducing a new parallel system for product development with people from all the critical functions working together throughout all the phases. The effectiveness of parallel system was only as good as those who were flexible to embrace the idea. The main idea of parallel system meant that a core team of people assembled from all the critical functions worked together continuously to move a product from conceptual stage to final production. In each of the core team, a project leader was designated to orchestrate its work, keep an eye on the complete project, secure resources for the team and serve as a liaison to senior management. This meant the project leader needed to have cross-functional expertise, a track record of high performance, and the respect of his or her colleagues. This approach had potential benefits in that it allowed people to be open-minded to the project as a whole and not their own individual department. It also allowed speedier product development. The ideas, however was only good in theory. In reality, there were many more challenges that became apparent once the project was underway. Parallel system was a challenge to the existing culture at MediSys because the company had an entrepreneurial culture that fosters innovative thinking allowing each department to complete their work as required by their department head. With this new approach, you have to...