This is the next article in a series of blog posts that explores Alcidion’s core values in action and how they influence our work, products and culture. In this blog, our Director of Service Delivery Andy Smallman describes how “We celebrate our achievements”.
My journey
I started working with Kate Quirke, our CEO, when I arrived in Australia fresh from the UK in 1999. While in the UK I worked extensively in the health care IT domain and certainly knew how to work hard. Working with Kate I realised that there was a perfect blend of working hard, doing a great job for the customer, and yet celebrating your success and having fun along the way!
The work we do
Over the years, our core team at Alcidion has been instrumental in some of the largest eHealth projects across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. We work across a diverse range of projects from consulting, product implementation, technical integration, analytics as well as support and managed services. Our current active projects in the ANZ region include:
- Implementation and go-live of a virtual care, remote patient monitoring and COVID management solution using Miya Precision and Miya Care, our patient app, into a leading healthcare organisation, rpavirtual at Sydney Local Health District
- Implementation and go-live of the Better Meds electronic medication management solution, including complex integration activities, into a pilot setting in New Zealand at Hawera Hospital, Taranaki District Health Board
- Continued implementation and onboarding services into a large state-wide provider index to streamline referral management for Queensland Health using the NextGate MatchMetrix software
- Delivering additional data sources and advanced dashboarding using the Miya Intelligence real time data warehouse solution
- Migrating Smartpage Clinical customers into an improved cloud hosted environment
- Undertaking an architecture and integration consulting assignment for a project using real time health data to provide early warning and predictive models
- Deploying advanced decision support and mobile notifications to a Miya Precision customer
- Delivering implementation and upgrade services for several Miya Precision, Miya Observations & Smartpage customers across Australia and New Zealand
- Providing continued support and project deliverables for a large custom built, FHIR based solution using Mulesoft APIs
- Delivering a business case and planning study for a real time surgical dashboard for General Practitioner reference
- Provision of project management and integration leadership skills to a large Victorian health service
- Continued support and additional services to migrate the largest health care Enterprise Services Bus in Australia, into a cloud hosted environment
- Upgrade and implementation services for a territory-based Patient Master Index using the NextGate MatchMetrix software
In addition to our project delivery, we also offer a 24×7 support service and a fully cloud hosted Managed Service (via our alcidion.cloud offering).
Celebration
At Alcidion we celebrate our achievements across the company, in our Sales pursuits, in Project delivery and in our Support successes. There is no better feeling than seeing your hard work come to fruition and end users finally getting to use something that will benefit them in their daily activities. The thrill of a project go live, can be intense and exhilarating, but also exhausting!
From the recruitment stage, while we focus on a person’s professional skill set, we also assess their fit with our Alcidion culture. We like to understand what makes a person “tick” and how they will suit our “work hard, play hard” approach.
As Director of Service Delivery, I am primarily involved in working with our customers to deliver and then support our solutions. This role leads to many long-term relationships that are very rewarding both from a personal and professional perspective.
For our larger project deliveries, we have a formal team structure with a Project Manager and often several individual functional and technical consultants providing input to achieve project success. The Project Manager works with our team and the customer’s team to focus on realisation of a successful outcome while also ensuring that this success is recognised and celebrated across the company. To reinforce these achievements, we have implemented a mechanism to capture and praise individual successes using our “Small Improvements” performance appraisal solution.
Celebrations may include cakes in the office or inviting the team for a drink or a meal. For some of our very large projects (and pre-pandemic) we have also sought opportunities to build a bond with the wider customer project team. We have celebrated milestones with project-based cricket challenges, ten pin bowling, or inviting the team for an evening out.
It is not only project achievements – we celebrate our sales and commercial successes too. Sometimes our sales campaigns in health IT can take several months, sometimes more than a year, and when we achieve our goals, we will often have a champagne moment which is shared across the entire organisation. A great example of this was achieving our amazing financial results for FY21 which was celebrated with a toast in a company-wide presentation.
Like everyone across the globe, the pandemic has affected the way we work. We have worked hard to maintain our culture of celebration and have continued our sense of common purpose through our regular team huddles. We have undertaken virtual scavenger hunts, quizzes, horse races and celebrated with hampers through difficult lockdown conditions.
As we start to move back to a more normal way of working, we are always looking for new ways to make sure we recognise and celebrate our successes. We have a few things in the pipeline including recognising success at the end of the year. In addition to our office-based celebrations, we are aiming to have “virtual Christmas drinks” with some of our close partners who are based in other countries across the world.
We all strive to work in a career that is fulfilling and rewarding. Working in Health IT and in a company like Alcidion certainly gives us that opportunity!
Andy Smallman is the Director of Service Delivery at Alcidion