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Explore questions from previous sessions

Take a look at Open Questions from previous Session to inspire you what kind of areas we can discuss and explore during workhops you will attend.

How your work and the situation that you are in Poland and your family in England influence your daily life? How you manage it long term? (Context work-life balance, expectation for other workers, working hours, long term living without family influence family relations).

You do not need money (you told us, shares, savings, no spending), so your motivation for work is pure “non – financial” – do you think that it influence your understanding of low-level staff (Maslow, they need other motivators than cash, but at this entry level cash/financial is very important)?

What’s your plan for next 5 years? It’s not possible to manage so complex organization including growth in Romania (recent acquisition), and huge growth in India. Do you plan to move to India with a family, give Romania and India to someone or you still do not think about it?

What is your vision of Medicover Healthcare Division in 5 years? Market position? Geographic coverage? New business areas? Drive towards acquisition or rather organic growth?

Let assume you perform SWOT analysis for the Medicover Healthcare Division: what major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you currently see?

If your team, your direct subordinates, come into conflict instead of cooperating – how do you manage it?

In which company you met with the best organized PMO and Project management process? How this worked? What generated the highest value there?

Let’s try to imagine a world without limits. How do you imagine the ideal PMO and Project management?

How do you assess PMO and Project management at Medicover? What would he want to work better than present (TOP 3)?

How to motivate people in fast-growing environment, where process gaps appear, responsibilities are not clear and back-office/shared services don’t support front-end operations effectively?

How Medicover will answer the challenges on the Polish labor market in terms of high employees’ turnover, pressure on salaries due to decreasing unemployment rate and shortages of medical staff?

How do you handle with stress/distress when you are out of your comfort zone?

If you have endless resources what would be the first thing what you will change in Medicover?

In your opinion which abilities (skills ) of our managers are invaluable – which abilities we have missed?

Do you believe that current leadership model (Your = “John-centric” model) is the best for building most effective business culture in our organisation? If so then why?

What are your expectations from the group after this leadership program, what are next steps?

Do we plan to deliver such or similar program/knowledge/experience to wider audience within Medicover?

Do you have a Mentor you can go to talk to , if you have doubts?

What do you consider your greatest success in Medicover?

How do you spend your free time with your children?

Have you ever thought about your own business?

What would the Medicover look like if you were the owner?

What are the 3 biggest weaknesses of our organization in Poland (with regards to people or other resources) that in your eyes might negatively impact our development?

What is your mid-term vision for our Businesses in Poland and globally – where do you see us in 3-5 years’ time? In terms of: market penetration/market development/product development/diversification?

You said ‘teacher will appear when pupil is ready’. Have you had an experience with poor teachers impacting long-term your views or behaviours which you had to challenge with time? To the extent that you realized that the teachers were actually wrong or hindering you in any way?

How do you keep under control a number of strategic projects within the organization? Do you use any tools? Excel? PM apps? List of supporting goals?

What is the optimal future structure and culture of Medicover? Which areas will be more precisely described in the procedures and which should keep flexibility and ability to taking quick decisions?

How many future Medicover leaders are in this room? 

Do you have your successor in your management team?

What is our biggest challenge for next year (one thing)?

Did you get anything from our sessions?

Do you think the leadership in Medicover Group is strong ?

What are the biggest weaknesses and strengths in Medicover ?

What would you like to do, and you do not have time for it (in private)?

Communication & Collaboration in division, business unit, group, with doctors?

What is your preferred way to relax?

If there would be one important thing that other could learn from/about Medicover, what would you like it to be? (Fe: How to make a great place to work…or How to reach excellence in Customer Service…)?

You mentioned that the way you were raised had a significant influence on you. Did you raised your own children in the similar way? What would you advise other parents?

How does your typical day look like? What are your working habits, routines? How do you organize your day ?

While you are on holidays, can you/do you stop thinking about the company? Are you online or Offline while vacations?

Cases to discuss:

We have email system dating back to the times when it was serving Medicover PL originally when it was significantly smaller. We grew, we became more complex, geographically spread and diverse, the email system is serving now about 20 business units. We as organization have need to communicate better but we do not have good tools. The new generation of tools is costly (when you look from Group perspective we have a huge volume to serve – over 15k employees), it is few times more expensive than current solution, therefore we have a problem to find a justification/business case. Why it is so expensive: it includes the package of services (email, chat, video, storage, sharepoint, etc.), that are integrated, have better parameters etc., while our solution is only email and it’s provisioning is orientated on cost efficiency, on the other hand it became complex over time and includes complexity overhead and risk (also related to very limited staff maintaining).
To convince anyone for new generation of tools, we cannot just say that we enable the communication and collaboration. Moreover Microsoft collaborations services, that we are currently evaluating are not ideal, but more importantly we as IT & business have no idea how we can really utilize them to support the business processes to find the justification.
One of the problems that I have identified was that majority of our (Medicover PL) doctors does not use corporate email at all. Therefore I could exclude them from the potential users of the communication platform. Why should we pay (subscriptions) for the service for doctors if they do not use it? On the other hand we would like to involve them in the communication.
So basically, the difficulty I see here is that IT can introduce the new communication tools, the tools that are not perfect itself and as such does not bring the organization to the next level, although they could be used in business processes, but there is nobody neither from IT nor business to find the good utilization of them that would justify the investment.
As for communication and collaboration cloud services, it must be said that if we want to fully utilize the power of them + we don’t want to increase the complexity we need to migrate all user (at least at business unit level)
Over recent months I spent a lot of time and effort, generating numerous presentations, but I could not find the suitable business case.

Over recent months I spent a lot of time and effort, generating numerous presentations, but I could not find the suitable business case.

I would like to hear your view on that, get an advise?
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Background

Even though we extended our IT teams a bit over recent year which might have even exceeded business growth during the same period we (IT Operations & Support) suffer from shortage of staff in different areas.

  • This shortage comes from a few facts:
  • Ethe complexity & volume exponential growth
  • Eoperational debt – we grew from small, now are bigger and the processes were not adjusted
  • Esecurity & compliance related activities
  • Example:
  • Ein the past there was just one administrators team responsible for: servers, storages, network, operating systems etc. There was one critical system that incidentally required administrators intervention after hours. There was no formalized 24x7 support so there is no now.
  • Enow we need separate teams specialized in: networking, hardware & virtualization, databases and other; same applies to business systems support: CIS, EMR, Telemedicine, PFM – there is no single person nor team that is able to troubleshoot all the issues 24x7
  • The issue:
  • Ein the as is operating model there is too little people in IT support teams that need to work on duty 24x7. Critical areas that require separate competencies:
  • ^core infrastructure
  • ^network infrastructure
  • ^systems & databases
  • The solution:
  • Ein order to regulate this we would need to double the size of the teams
  • Alternative solution:
  • Eaccept the risk that if needed we cannot guarantee full 24x7 support (agree reasonable way how we can require from people their availability?)
  • Ediscuss desired & required support hours and adjust the team; business partner needed; cost control acceptance should be aligned