Telephone Excellence by Mike Mitchell

Getting Your Mind Aligned: Telecom's Role in Business Planning
By Mike Mitchell

A clear and vigorous business strategy is essential to any organization. To be successful, this strategy must be supported by all leaders and understood by employees. Designed to sustain competitive advantage, a strategic business plan can be effectively implemented using a structured process that includes both tactical and operational plans. Your organization most likely has a sound strategic plan that provides the criteria employees need to make day-to-day organizational decisions. If you do not know what your organization's business plan entails, what the goals and objectives are for the year, or where your organization plans to be in the future, you won't be as an effective telecom manager as you could be.

It is important for you to understand how your organization develops its strategic plan and subsequent goals and objectives. Generally, your hospital leadership will perform an assessment (often with the help of a healthcare consultant) to figure out the best course of action to achieve specific goals such as growing the business, improving efficiency, and reducing costs. Strategic planning is usually done every five to ten years. However, the plan is reviewed annually to ensure targets are on course and to make any necessary adjustments.

This annual strategic plan review is especially important to telecom managers, since we are charged with ensuring our communications systems can effectively respond to a dynamic environment. It is essential that our systems have the ability to blend any new technology (e.g. nurse call systems, IVRs, ACDs, payroll systems, etc.) into our existing communications infrastructure.

Following are the three components of a business plan, the development of which falls under different levels of management.
• Strategic Plan - includes long term (five to ten years) organizational and budgetary objectives. Decision makers are the Board of Directors and C-level administrators.
• Tactical Plan- charts the course as to how the strategic objectives are to be accomplished. Division directors and business unit managers plot this course.
• Operational Plan - includes the daily tasks required to achieve the tactical plan. Department managers and supervisors are responsible for this plan.

As telecom managers, our job is to respond to the needs of our organization. If we don't know the organization's strategic and tactical goals and objectives, how can we plan for future needs? This may be a moving target, but it is our job to be informed and stay in the loop.

For example, my hospital, in an effort to eliminate unprofitable business lines, closed our skilled nursing facility. The vacated area was used to expand another medical unit. As a telecom manager, my job was to make sure that the cable infrastructure could handle the additional telephones and the PBX was equipped to accommodate the expansion. By knowing the hospital's plans in advance, I was able to include the estimated expenses in the capital and operations budget which covered the necessary equipment and contract labor needed to expand the telecom services.

Hopefully, your hospital leadership keeps employees informed of the organization's goals and objectives and ensures managers and directors have the latest time schedules for any changes. If not, I urge you to speak with your division director or VP to make sure you have the most current information available. Getting your mind aligned with your hospital leadership's will enable you to be proactive in your department planning and budget processes.

- Mike