In these days of rapid healthcare innovation, many new products and services are being introduced every day. Organizational structures for the development and launch of these new products and services are many and varied. Some are built to optimize business objectives, some engineering excellence, others drive towards on-time availability and still others to maintain employee expertise as a core organizational asset. Ideally we want to tune our organizational structures to maximize all of these worthwhile objectives.

This course will introduce a number of basic organizational structures and discuss the tradeoffs involved with each. In addition, there is often natural conflicts which exist between the business executives of the organization and the team chartered with developing and launching the new products and services. This course will discuss the basis for this natural conflict and try and define a structure that both business and technical objectives can be met.

The topics covered in this "Organize for Healthcare Product Development, Pain & Simple" course are:

• Functional Organization

• Matrix Organization

• Project Organization

• Venture Organization

• Healthcare Example

• Business vs Engineering Mindset

• Engineering Estimates

• The Triple Constraint

• Global Development Teams

The basic concepts behind structures can be complicated. This "PLAIN AND SIMPLE" series attempts to discuss these concepts in a very simple and easy to understand format using many examples from both non-healthcare and healthcare environments. This course is targeted at the entry level (Basic and Intermediate Level) learner.

The content of the series is based on the author's 35 years experience in the healthcare information systems business. This experience spans product design and launch, marketing, business development and executive management (including president). In addition, it is based on 15 years teaching at the graduate level in the University environment.