Reliable and indispensable
User report from IQTIG (Institute for Quality Assurance and Transparency in Health Care)
Projektron BCS is a reliable and indispensable management tool for us to manage our projects efficiently and to use our resources in a sensible and targeted manner. The licensing system that BCS provides allows us to give employees different rights and thus grant access to everyone without everyone being able to change or see everything.
IQTIG - The Institution for Quality in Health Care
The Institute for Quality Assurance and Transparency in Health Care - IQTIG for short - is the central institute for statutory quality assurance in health care in Germany in accordance with § 137a Para. 1 SGB V (German Social Code). We are scientifically and professionally independent and work in particular for the Joint Federal Committee (G-BA), but also for the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) with our expertise in various tasks of quality assurance in medical care. As a non-profit foundation, we make an important contribution to improving healthcare for patients.
Our staff of just over 200 covers a broad spectrum of expertise, enabling us to provide the best possible advice to the G-BA and the BMG and to implement procedures in accordance with the guidelines and the G-BA's mandates. We develop quality assurance procedures initially and also continue to develop them. In doing so, we follow the "Methodological Principles" of the IQTIG and apply various biometric methods and techniques in the preparation of results reports.
For the implementation of the quality assurance procedures we develop specifications for software providers and other entities in the data flow. The production chain from specification writing to data acceptance and processing to calculation and publication of results is digitized to a high degree by software developed at IQTIG.
Projektron BCS has been a companion to the IQTIG from the very beginning.
The IQTIG was founded in 2015 and had to perform all legal tasks of external quality assurance within one year. This made intensive project planning necessary from the very beginning. We had to plan the technical set-up of the systems for the implementation of existing quality assurance procedures of various guidelines of the G-BA and at the same time ensure the ongoing operation with the support of third parties. In addition, the new and further development of quality assurance procedures had to be managed. These diverse tasks were and are organized in projects. Some of them require interdepartmental planning and cooperation. We carry out an average of 130 projects in parallel.
The commissioning of our main client, the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), and the start of new quality assurance procedures, which usually take several years to implement, depend on the consultations of external committees and can therefore not always be planned exactly in terms of time and often also in terms of workload. In addition, internal projects have to be planned and reported on, some of which depend on the commissions or are carried out completely separately.
We were therefore looking for a multi-project management tool with multi-user mode. It should show all IQTIG projects at a glance as well as only specific projects for certain organizational units. For project planning and monitoring, a direct connection to personnel planning should be possible in order to be able to make reliable statements about the availability and utilization of employees at any time. For example, if orders and tasks change or need to be commented on, project managers should be able to make adjustments in a project at the same time as our central project management.
One of our employees had already worked successfully with Projektron BCS and recommended the tool to the institute's management and commercial management. The Projektron employees are always very approachable and helpful, and the support colleagues have excellent knowledge of the program. They are always willing to make appointments to clarify issues. Projektron offers training courses with different focuses, which all our project managers and BCS administrators have attended. These services facilitate the individualization of the product and a speedy implementation. BCS supports all these requirements.
Since BCS has a lot of functions and menu items are displayed contextually, it is necessary to use the tool regularly during the familiarization phase. If you don't do this, you will always wonder where the function you just need can be called or where the view with the combination of planned/actual values of the project in a certain period is hiding. But if you keep at it, the high level of functionality is really very valuable.
Projektron BCS is run as an on-premise application on a Postgres database at IQTIG. We use a test and a live environment so that we can test new versions of BCS intensively on the test system before we roll them out. We can recommend this in order to familiarize ourselves with the features before rolling them out in the company, to try out new settings or simply to be able to check the smooth functioning of the individual solutions after an update.
At IQTIG, we started using the project management features, time tracking and absence management (vacation, compensatory time off, sickness). Later, we put contract management into operation. Next, we plan to use BCS to handle asset management in onboarding and offboarding of employees. We also briefly experimented with linking the ticket system to Atlassian products and connecting the reminder functions to MS Exchange, but did not find this helpful.
BCS has many very good features, but it also takes special requests into account. For example, it was important for us to be able to continue using the data from the BCS database outside of BCS. Our special requests were implemented by Projektron as individual solutions and help us to use the tool optimally for our objectives. The focus of this user report is on these special functions.
IQTIG Individual Solutions in Project Management
It was important for us to be able to store more information in the master data of a project than Projektron BCS provides in the standard. Projektron GmbH has therefore adapted the master data management exactly to the needs of IQTIG. We can now additionally store cost unit numbers, order texts and the date of an order as well as information on documents outside of BCS and use it for project controlling.
For exporting the information from BCS to other systems or documents, another field has been added, which allows us to select nodes in projects for export in the structure plan. This enables a targeted export of a project overview for further use in MS Excel. In this context, we also use the assignment of projects to product groups. This allows us to evaluate project successes according to project groups. This deposit of project groups is an individual solution for IQTIG.
We regularly use the "Project Manager Notes " feature to report on the status of projects, show progress, and outline risks and countermeasures. Specifically for IQTIG, we have obtained additional fields to store an IQTIG-specific traffic light status and categories for the causes of delays.
Report-relevant information (selected via a special indicator for IQTIG) is forwarded to supervisors, the commercial department and the institute management. Projektron individualized the output format of the reports for our needs and thus shortened the detour via MS Word templates.
Working time recording, vacation planning and sick days are also mapped in BCS. This allows us to easily query resource utilization during project planning and execution and thus identify and react to bottlenecks at an early stage. For payroll accounting, an extension of Projektron was provided, with which sick days can be transferred directly to external payroll accounting.
Projektron BCS is an important tool for us
BCS is a reliable and indispensable management tool for us to manage our projects efficiently and to use our resources in a sensible and targeted way. In BCS we manage to go through planning steps easily by using the wizards. Employees who want to perform more complex tasks in project planning can do so by calling up masks directly. The licensing system that BCS provides allows to give different rights to employees and thus to give access to everyone without everyone being able to change or see everything.
We use BCS to standardize our internal reporting and also to extract data for external parties and then prepare it outside BCS. This allows us to access up-to-date data quickly and easily, providing our clients with overviews in the form they need them.
The contract management module with its reminder function helps us manage our contracts and our licenses. It can be individually set whether and how long a reminder should be sent before a term expires. This allows us to use different reminder intervals depending on the necessary lead time for a procurement.
BCS offers many more applications beyond the functions described above. Not all of them are currently useful to us. However, new use cases are constantly emerging in which BCS can support us either with the standard solutions or with individual adaptations.
