The People Behind the AIMS Project

The AIMS Project brings terms like processes, practices and policies to mind, but that’s not the primary focus of the project. AIMS is essentially about people and creating tools to make their work easier, providing employees with faster, more convenient service and about employers being able to make better informed business decisions so that additional resources can be dedicated to frontline patient care.

Over the next several weeks, a series of workshops are being conducted across the province to gather information on current practices. At these workshops, employees from the healthcare system will be engaged in exercises designed to identify those who will use AIMS, and what their needs may be. This task begins by developing personas, which are a snapshot of the people that AIMS will serve.

Personas vary according to occupational function, and are one of several tools by which needs are assessed. The ideas attributed to a persona may undergo change once further research is completed, but the personas provide a useful starting point to ground the evaluation of wants and needs for both employees and the system as a whole.

A sample of a persona would be a Warehousing and Distribution Manager who wants:

• To track provincial inventory to plan optimal inventory levels
• Product standardization
• Access historical data to achieve economies of scale
• A customer catalogue and order status feature
• Understand deliverables for better supplier contract management

The manager may struggle with:

• Lack of provincial inventory tracking which leads to crisis management
• Vague product descriptions result in off-contract orders
• No historical data, which is required to obtain competitive bids
• Lack of insight into deliverables creates issues, leading to reactive responses
• Too many points of entry into the system (phone, paper, email, fax, walk-ins, etc.)

Another person would be a WFM Scheduler who wants:

• Online scheduling
• Employees able to submit availability online
• Provincial scheduling for multi-site employees
• Automated approvals (leave, etc.)
• Able to accommodate numerous pay rules/exceptions

The Scheduler may struggle with:

• No provincial scheduling data
• Inability for staff to flag availability
• Inconsistent approval processes
• Large volumes of paper-based requests
• No single source of truth due to the lack of real-time, integrated data

“Individual personas identify, in theoretical terms, the people who will access the system from a particular point of view,” explains Kweku Johnson, Functional Lead for Human Resources. “By developing these profiles in advance, we are able to stay in touch with employee needs as the project unfolds.”

Workshops will continue through the Imagine Phase of the project.