informatics

EHR: How Important is Due Diligence?

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What was your first car?  Mine was a 60’ something Corvair–$300.  Four doors, black vinyl bench seating that required hours of hand-stitching to hide the slash marks made by the serial killer who was the prior owner, an AM and a radio, push-button transmission located on the dash.  Maroon-ish.  Fifty miles to the quart of oil—I carried a case of oil in the trunk.  One bonus feature was the smoke screen it provided to help me elude potential terrorists.

I am far from mechanically inclined.  In high school I failed the ASVAB, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—the put the round peg in the round hole test.  Just to understand how un-complex the Corvair was, I, who hardly knows how to work the radio in a new car, rebuilt the Corvair’s alternator—must not have had many working parts.  Due the the excessive amount of rusting I could see the street from the driver’s side foot well.

However, it had one thing going for it; turning the key often made it go—at least for the first three or four months.  Serves me right.  The guy selling the car pitched it as a date-mobile, alluding to the bench front seat.  Not wanting to look stupid, I bought it.  Pretty poor due diligence.  An impulse purchase to meet what I felt was a social imperative—a lean, mean, dating machine.

The last time I made a good impulse purchase was an ice cream sandwich on a hundred degree day.  Most of my other impulse decisions could have used some good data.  The lack of good data falls on one person, me.

How good is the data you have for deciding to implement an EHR?  In selecting an EHR?  Did you perform the necessary due diligence?  How do you know?  Gathering good data is tedious, and it can lack intellectual stimulation.  I think it affects the same side of our brain as when our better half asks us to stop and ask someone for directions; we like being impulsive, and have built a career based on having made decisions on good hunches.

The difference between you buying and EHR and me buying a clunker is that when I learned I’d made a poor decision I was able to buy a different car.  You can’t do that with an EHR that has more zeros in the price tag than the national deficit.  Plenty of hospitals are on EHR 2.0–they also happen to be on CIO 2.0. while CIO 1.0 is out shopping for a Corvair.

EHR–WWOD (What would Oprah do?)

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So, I’m watching a football game on television and it suddenly strikes me, there are probably a lot of people trying to understand what it is a consultant does that we can’t do for ourselves.

For those who have a life, those who missed the game, Alabama opens the game with several well-scripted opening plays and grabbed an early lead.

Their first ‘n’ offensive plays were brilliant.  They were planned perfectly.

It became apparent they had not planned the however many of the ‘n + 1′ plays.  Their plan failed to go beyond what they’d already accomplished.

How does that apply to what you do, what I do, and why I think I can help you?  It is best described by comparing your brain to a consultant’s brain.  Your work brain functions exactly as it should.  It’s comprised of little boxes of integrated work activities, one for admissions and registration, one for diagnosis, another for care.  There’s probably another box for whatever it is the newsletter stated IT was doing three months ago and how that impacts what you do.  That’s your job.

Your boxes interface in some form or fashion with the boxes of the person next to you in the hospital’s basement cafeteria who is paying for her chicken, broccoli, and rice dish that reminds you of what you ate at crazy Uncle Bob’s wedding reception.  That interface is the glue that makes the hospital work.  It’s also the synapse, the connective tissue—I know it’s a weak metaphor, but it’s a holiday weekend—give me some slack—that tries to keep healthcare functioning in an 0.2 business model.

There are names for the connective tissue, you know it and I know it.  It’s called politics.  It’s derived from antiquated notions like, “this is how we’ve always done it”, “that’s radiology’s problem”, and “nobody asked me”,

At some point over the next week or two the inevitable happens; the need arises for you to add some tidbit of information.  Do you add it to an existing box, put it in an empty box, or ignore it?  This is where you must separate the wheat from the albumen—just checking to see how closely you’re following.

Your personal warehouse of boxes looks like the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark—acre after acre of dusty, full boxes, no Dewy-decimal filing system, and no empty box.  There are two rules at the hospital; one, bits of information must go somewhere, and two, nobody can change rule one.

The difference, and it’s a big one, is that consultants have an empty box.  It’s our Al Gore lockbox.  We were born that way.  It’s like having a cleft chin.  We also have no connective tissue to your organization.  No groupthink.  No Stepford Wives. No Invasion of the Body Snatchers to turn us into mindless pods.  Consultants may be the only people who don’t care.  Let me rephrase that.  We don’t care about the politics.  We don’t care that the reason the hospital has four IT departments is because the hospital’s leadership was afraid to tell the siloed docs that they couldn’t buy or build whatever they wanted.

Sometimes it comes down to your WWOD (what would Oprah do) moment.  Not ‘what do they want me to do’, not ‘what would they do’, not ‘what is the least disruptive’, not ‘what goes best with what the other hospital did’.

At some point it comes down to, what is the right thing to do; what should we do.

Big, hairy healthcare IT projects come out of the shoot looking like Alabama did.  The first however many moves are scripted perfectly.  Heck, you can download them off Google.  Worse yet, you can get your EHR vendor to print them for you.

The wheat from the albumen moment comes when you have to come up with an answer to the questions, “What do we do next,” and “Why doesn’t it work like they said it would?”

That’s why consultants have an open box.  You know what we are doing when our brain takes us to the open box?  Thinking.  No company politics to sidetrack us.  Everybody knows the expected answers, but often the expected answer is not the best answer.  Almost everybody knows what comes after A, B, C, and D.

Sometimes…E is not the right answer or the best answer.

EHR: read before you buy

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There is a first time for everything.  Sunday was the first time it occurred to me that there is a difference between being twenty and not being twenty.  A few days ago one of the women at the gym was bemoaning the fact that being forty wasn’t at all like being thirty–puhleeaasse.

My wife would have me point out her admonition of “You are not twenty anymore.”  Women do not understand that to men this phrase goes into our little brains and comes out reshuffled as the phrase “Just you wait and see.”

There are those who would have you believe that there is no single muscle that is connected to every other muscle, a muscle which if pulled will make every other muscle hurt.  I beg to differ.  I think I found it—I call it a my groinal—it’s connected to my adverse and inverse bent-egotudinals, the small transflexors located behind the mind’s eye.  I found the muscle while running back a kickoff during a Saturday morning game of flag football.

Call it an homage to the Kennedys.  Sort of made me fee like one of them—I think it was Ethyl.  Old guys versus new guys—I know it’s a poor word choice but you know what I mean which after all is why we’re both here.  Did I mention that everything aches, so much so that I tried dipping myself in Tylenol?

There are two types of people who play football, those who like to hit people and those who don’t like being hit.  I am clearly a member of the latter camp.  I used to be able to avoid being hit by being faster than the other guy.  This day I avoided getting hit by running away from the other guy.

The weird part is that my mind still pictures my body doing things just like the college kids on the field, and it feels the same, it just isn’t.  Two kids passed me–they were probably on steroids, and my only reaction was the parent in me wanting to ground the two of them.  Half the guys are moving at half the speed of the other guys.  At the end of each play, we find our side doubled over, our hands on our knees, our eyes scanning the sidelines for oxygen and wondering why the ground appears to be swaying.

As the game progresses, instead of running a deep curl pattern, I find myself saying things like, “I’ll take two steps across the line of scrimmage, hit me if I’m open.”  Thirty minutes later I’m trying to cut a deal with their safety, telling him, “I’m not in this play, I didn’t even go to the huddle.”  After that I’m telling the quarterback, “If you throw it to me, I’m not going to catch it, no matter what.”

All the parts are the same ones I’ve always had, but they aren’t functioning the way they should.  It’s a lot like assembling a gas grill and having a few pieces remaining—I speak from experience.  Unfortunately, implementing complex healthcare information technology systems can often result in things not functioning the way they should, even if you have all the pieces.  It helps to have a plan, have a better one than you thought you needed, have one written by people who plan nasty HIT systems, then have someone manage the plan, someone who can walk into the room and say, “This is what we are going to do on Tuesday, because this is what you should do on Tuesday on big hairy projects.”.

Then, if you pull your groinal muscle implementing EHR, try dipping yourself in Tylenol.

EHR’s Kitchen Table Amateurs (KTAs)

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So I’m making dinner the other night and I’m reminded of a story I heard a while back on NPR. The narrator and his wife were telling stories about their 50 year marriage, some of the funny memories they shared which helped keep them together. One of the stories the husband related was about his wife’s meatloaf. Their recipe for meatloaf was one they had learned from his wife’s mother. Over the years they had been served meatloaf at the home of his in-laws on several occasions, and on most of those occasions his wife would help her mom prepare the meatloaf. She’d mix the ingredients in a large wooden bowl; 1 pound each of ground beef and ground pork, breadcrumbs, two eggs, some milk, salt, pepper, oregano, and a small can of tomato paste. She’d knead the mixture together, shape into a loaf, and place the loaf into the one-and-a-half pound pan, discarding the leftover mixture. She would then pour a mixture of tomato paste and water, along with diced carrots and onions on top of the two loaf, and then garnish it with strips of bacon.

He went on to say that meatloaf night at home was one of his favorite dinners. His wife always prepared the dish exactly as she had learned from her mother. One day he asked her why she threw away the extra instead of cooking it all. She replied that she was simply following her mother’s recipe.  The husband said, “The reason your mom throws away part of the meatloaf is because she doesn’t own a two-pound baking pan. We have a two pound pan. You’ve been throwing it away all of these years and I’ve never known why until now.”

Therein lays the dilemma. We get so used to doing things one way that we forget to question whether there may a better way to do the same thing. Several of you have inquired as to how to incorporate some of the EHR strategy ideas in your organization, how to get out of the trap of continuing to do something the same way it’s been done, simply because that’s the way things are done. It’s difficult to be the iconoclast, someone who attacks the cherished beliefs of the organization. It is especially difficult without a methodology and an approach. Without a decent methodology, and some experience to shake things up, we’re no better off than a kitchen table amateur (KTA). A KTA, no matter how well-intentioned, won’t be able to affect change. The end results would be no better than sacrificing three goats and a chicken.

So, think about how to define the problem, how to find a champion, and how to put together a plan to enable you to move the focus to developing a proper strategy, one that will be flexible enough to adapt to the changing requirements. But keep the goats and the chicken handy just in case this doesn’t work.

EHR: How trained users killed productivity

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In order to complete today’s lesson you will need one prop, your EHR vendor contract. I will pause for a moment—please let us know when you are ready to proceed.  Ready?

Now, turn to the section with all of the commas and zeroes, that is right, it is probably labeled pricing.  Skim down until you see the line item for training.  Got it?  It is a rather substantial number is it not?  And that number is simply the number your vendor is charging you to train your people.  Your actual training costs are probably double or triple that amount.

Why?  Because there is an opportunity cost for each hour of time one of your employees spends in training to use the EHR.  It is an hour they are not spending doing what they were hired to do.  Now I know some of you are thinking ‘Only Roemer will try to make a big deal out of EHR training.  Goodness knows, he has come down hard on everything else associated with EHR,” and you are probably correct.

Gartner suggests that for an average ERP project firms should budget seventeen percent of the total project cost to training end-users.  Seventeen percent.  I can hear the CFOs gnashing their respective teeth.  Knowing that EHR is at least as disruptive to the organization, and will have more users than ERP, let us agree that a good rule of thumb for training costs for EHR is fifteen percent of the total cost of the EHR project.  When you factor in the opportunity cost of 2X the number starts to get pretty big.

We all can name hospitals whose EHR project cost north of one hundred million dollars.  Who are we trying to kid; we can name hospitals whose cost was way north of that figure.  Looking back at your vendor contract I am willing to bet that nobody budgeted training at or around fifteen percent of the total cost of the project.

Is that a bad thing?  No.  Why?  EHR projects are not failing as a result of hospitals not spending enough on end-user training.  I know that statement flies in the face of conventional IT wisdom, but here is my thinking behind that statement.

Training is designed to get the end-users to use the EHR the way the EHR is intended to be used.  And that is not a good thing.  Whoa big fella.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at your EHR productivity numbers.  Didn’t productivity nose-dive once you required your trained end-users to use the EHR?  Still don’t believe me, ask your physicians and nurses.

Why not train everybody again, wouldn’t that help?  What did Einstein say about the definition of insanity?  Insanity is doing something over and expecting different results.  If the hospital already spent fifteen million dollars to train the end-users on the EHR, and the result was a twenty percent drop in productivity, might it not be time to say enough already?

EHR adage 101: When you are in a hole stop digging.

The EHR project summary for many hospitals reads a little like this:

  • EHR cost               $100,000,000
  • Training cost          $15,000,000
  • Opportunity cost $15,000,000
  • Productivity loss 20%
  • Cost of productivity loss—priceless

Face it; you spent millions of dollars to be worse off than you already were.

Today I spoke with the CFO of a hospital that owned one of those hundred million dollar EHRs.  His question to me was whether or not he should hire the EHR vendor or a large, expensive system integrator to help him recapture the productivity loss.  I told him no.  Why?  All the EHR vendor will do is to retrain your people, and you have already proven that training your people to use the EHR brought about the productivity loss.  After all, it wasn’t untrained users who did it.  Why not hire a systems integrator for tens of millions to reimplement the system?  Because I bet you put the system in correctly in the first place.

If training is not the reason productivity is low and a poor implementation is not the reason, what is?  Productivity is low because the hundred million dollar EHR never included a single dollar of resource to design it around how your physicians and nurses function.  Your expensive EHR was built to answer the question of what needs to be done; it was not designed to deal with the issue of how something is to be done.  At best, the only input the hospital had, if it had even this much, was a list of functional requirements that was handed over to a bunch of coders.  I am willing to bet in most cases even this did not happen because all of the EHR code was already written.  The EHR is not productive because it was never designed for your organization.

It is never too late to incorporate design into a business system, but remember, neither IT nor the EHR vendors are designers, and you have already seen their results.

What was the name of your project that lost all the productivity

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Since we are already talking about productivity I thought it would be worth spending a few minutes trying to understand why large numbers of hospitals seem to have acquiesced to the notion that operating with a productivity loss is their new steady state.

Imagine for a second that you were to discover that your least costly resource, say the person who answered the phones was spending twenty percent of their day updating their Facebook page.  Were that the case, you would know two things with a high degree of certainty;

  1. The productivity loss had a measurable cost
  2. The productivity loss would be corrected quickly

Now imagine that your hospital spent eight or nine figures on an EHR system.  Imagine that the hospital’s most expensive resources, the doctors, are spending most of their time entering data into the hospital’s expensive EHR system, so much time in fact that they are only able to see eighty-percent of their patients.  Now imagine that you do not have to imagine these because they are real.

Headline:  EHR results in a twenty-percent productivity loss.

Any hospital executive should be able to answer the following two questions:

  1. How much does each percentage of productivity loss cost the hospital?
  2. What is the name of the project to recover the lost productivity?

The project has no name because there is no project, and that is a shame.  The project to create the productivity loss had some stellar name, it had a war room, and it probably even had its own T-shirts.  The project to lose all of that productivity was a massive undertaking.

Should not the project to recover the productivity receive a little attention?

There are those who believe the lost productivity is gone forever.  Productivity is not like energy; it can be created and destroyed.  All kidding aside, there is a way to retrieve the lost productivity, all of it.  If you would like to know let me know.

EHR’s Two Types of Failure at your Hospital

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"Kinetic productivity"

I have been rereading John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart.  It seems his purpose for the book is to help men cope with their feelings of not measuring up to their father’s expectations.  It delivers its punch at much the same level as the last scene in the film Field of Dreams when the father and son have a chance for one last catch.

(I am pausing parenthetically for a moment for the men to wipe their collective eyes.)

Here comes the segue, so hold on to your EHRs.  Let us spend some time dealing with lost opportunity and failure.  What if we define two types of failures; kinetic failure and potential failure?

Kinetic Failure: the failure to achieve the possible

Potential Failure: the failure to achieve the probable

Viewed from the perspective of productivity, let us define X to represent the service provider’s pre-EHR productivity; the distance from P to A represents the productivity loss brought about by the EHR, and the distance from A to K represents the opportunity loss.

P——————————A—————————K

One can argue with some degree of reason that the purchase of an EHR was made with the reasonable assumption that in addition to improving quality and patient safety the EHR would improve productivity to some degree.  In fact, assuming the provider did any sort of cost benefit analysis or return on investment calculation, any ROI, if it exists lives somewhere along the path between A and K.

If productivity is not improved, the service provider incurs an opportunity loss, a kinetic failure. At that point the best a service provider can hope to achieve is to not suffer a productivity loss.

One can also argue that the purchase of an EHR was made with the reasonable assumption that the implementation of EHR would not reduce productivity.

In many service providers EHR has resulted in a double hit to productivity; not only did they not achieve the productivity gains that were possible, they lost productivity.  A lot of people raise complaints when they speak about how much productivity costs.  One thing that is for certain, productivity costs a lot less than lost productivity.

This lost productivity, the kinetic failure, is the elephant in the service provider’s waiting room.  It has been poking its trunk through the door, and the only thing it wants once it gets its trunk through the door is to get all the way in the room.

Well, it is in the room, all the way in.

Part of the confusion facing providers is due to the fact that no matter how bad the productivity loss, a provider can still qualify as a meaningful user. That fact has led many providers to believe that since they can still qualify as such, that perhaps the productivity loss cannot be all bad news.

Let us look at a real example from a client of mine, a hundred and forty physician practice.  This practice had hit a barrier in terms of its ability to add patients, doctors, and staff.  It was running consistently an hour to an hour and a half behind with its patients.

The practice spent millions to implement an EHR.  Several months post implementation the practice was still running an hour behind.  Automating bad practices resulted in only one thing; the bad practices were completed faster.

To have any hope of avoiding kinetic failure and potential failure a healthcare practice must address how it runs its business.  Some business processes are duplicative, some are outdated, and some are wasteful.

Every one of those eats away at possible and probable productivity.  EHR was not designed to be a productivity windfall, but it clearly shines a spotlight on lost productivity.

Fortunately, even if your EHR has led to a productivity loss, all is not lost. Kinetic productivity can be regained, and potential productivity can be captured.  The path to productivity slices right through how the EHR is being used.  User Experience, UX, and usability, can and should be examined, redesigned and deployed.  This is not for the squeamish as it will cut through constraints like ‘We can’t do that’ and ‘We have always done it this way.’

Can’t and always must become productivity’s road kill.

EHR: It is like herding cats

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I spent a summer in Weaverville, North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. (I couldn’t find it on the map either.) That summer, I was the head wrangler at Windy Gap, a summer camp for high school kids. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a horse, much less ridden one, so I guess that’s why they put me in charge. I thought that maybe if I dressed the part that would help. I bought a hat and borrowed a pair of cowboy boots from a friend; the boots were a half size too small, and I spent the better part of the first night stuffing sticks of butter down them trying to get them off my swollen feet.

The ranch’s full-time hand taught us how saddle the horses and little bit about how to ride. In the mornings we had to herd the horses from the fields, bring them into the corral, and saddle them. The other wranglers would ride out to the field to bring in the horses, while I being the least experience of the wranglers would race after them in my running shoes trying to coax them back to the barn. We would take the children for a breakfast ride halfway up a mountain path where we would let them rest and cook them a breakfast of sausage and scrambled eggs. One morning there were a group of 15 high school girls sitting on the fence of the corral. I walked up behind them carrying two saddle bags filled with the breakfast fare. I slung the saddlebags over the top rail of the fence, and hoping to make a good impression I placed one hand on the rail and vaulted myself over. I landed flat on my back smack dab in the middle of the pile of what horses produce when they’re done eating—so much for the good impression.  That earned me the nick-name, “Poop Wrangler.”

I brushed myself off and saddled my horse. The moment I gripped the reins the horse reared, made a dash for the fence and jumped it in one motion. I could tell the high school girls were impressed as I flew by them. Both of my arms were wrapped around the horse’s neck, and I had my hands locked in a death grip. I yelled, “whoa” and stop”, only to learn that the horse didn’t speak English. We raced the 200 yards to the dining hall, stopped on a dime, and raced back to the corral, as the girls continued to cheer. One final leap, and I was back where I started; on the ground, in the corral, looking up at the girls. I took a bow and quickly remounted my steed. The full-time ranch hand came over and instructed me rather loudly, “You can’t let the horse do that. You have to show the horse that you’re in charge.” After that piece of wisdom he grabbed my horse by its bit, pulled its head down, and bit a hole in my horse’s ear. I’m not sure what kind of in an impression it made on my horse. I guarantee you it made an impression on me.

Horses aren’t very intelligent, but they know when you don’t know what you’re doing, when you’re bluffing—dressing like a cowboy didn’t even fool the girls, much less my horse—I guess he hadn’t seen many westerns. Here we go—you had to know where this was headed.

Selecting and implementing an EHR will be the most complex project your hospital will undertake.  If you do it wrong, you may not look any better than I did laying on my back in the corral.  You won’t have girls laughing at you, but you also may be looking for another line of work.

You don’t want to read this, but if your projected spend exceeds ten million dollars, your chances of success, even if you do everything right, is less than fifty percent.  I define success as on time, on budget, functioning at the desired level, and accepted by the users.  That’s reasonable, correct?  We don’t need to talk percentages if you don’t do everything right.

These figures come from the Bull Report—that’s really the name, honest.

The main IT project failure criteria identified by the IT and project managers were:

missed deadlines (75%)
exceeded budget (55%)
poor communications (40%)
inability to meet project requirements (37%).

The main success criteria identified were :

meeting milestones (51%)
maintaining the required quality levels (32%)
meeting the budget (31%)

How is yours matching against these?  Given a choice, sometimes I’d rather be the horse.

Your EHR: Is it Well & Good?

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There were four of us, each wearing dark suits and sunglasses, walking uniformly down the street, pausing at a cross-walk labeled “consultants only”—I think it’s a trick because a lot of drivers seem to speed up when they see us. We looked like a bad outtake from the movie Reservoir Dogs. We look like that a lot.

Why do you consult, some ask? It beats sitting home listening to Michael Bolton or practicing my moves for So You Think You Can Dance, I tell them.

Listening to the BBC World News on NPR whilst driving, there’s one thing I always come away with—they, the British, are always so…so British. No matter the subject—war or recession—I feel like I should sit up straight and having a proper pot of tea and little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed; no small feat while navigating the road.

Today’s NPR conversation included a little homily about the Gordian knot with which the company Timberland is wrestling, questioning whether as a company Timberland should do well, or do good. (Alexander the Great attempted to untie such a knot, and discovered the knot had no end (sort of like a Möbius strip, a one-sided piece of paper–pictured above. (For the truly obtuse, among which I count myself, the piece of paper can be given a half twist in two directions; clockwise or counter-clockwise, thereby giving it a handedness, making it chiral—when the narrative gets goofy enough, sooner or later the Word dictionary surrenders as it did with chiral.))) I’m done speaking in parentheses.

Should timberland do well or good? Knowing what little command some have of the English language, NPR’s listeners must have wondered, why ask a redundant question. Why indeed? That’s why I love the English, no matter the circumstances they refuse to stoop to speaking American.

Back to Gordo and his knot. That was the point of the knot. One could not have both—sorry for the homonym. Alexander knew that since the knot had no end, the only way to untie it was to cut it. The Gordian knot is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, and the solution is called the “Alexandrian solution”.

To the question; Well or good. Good or evil. Are the two choices mutually exclusive? For an EHR? They need not be, no matter how intractable the EHR. The question raised by the BBC was revenue-focused (doing well) versus community or green-focused (doing good). My question to the reader is what happens if we view EHR with this issue as an implication, a la p→q.Let’s review a truth table:

if P equals if Q equals p→q is
define requirements increase revenues

TRUE
play vendor darts increase revenues

FALSE
ignore change management increase revenues

FALSE
no connectivity increase revenues

FALSE
new EHR software increase revenues

FALSE
change processes increase revenues

TRUE
eliminate waste increase revenues

TRUE
decrease redundancy increase revenues

TRUE
Strong PMO increase revenues

TRUE

From a healthcare provider’s perspective the answers can be surprising; EHR can be well and good, or not well and not good.  The Alexandrian solution for EHR is a Alexandrian PMO.

Have your people call my people–we’ll do lunch.

Healthcare IT: Musings of a drive-by mind

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It takes a lot of energy to dislike someone, but sometimes it is worth the effort. It is not easy being a consultant.  One client required that I shout “unclean, unclean” as I passed through the hallways.  Maybe that is why I leave newspapers scattered around the floor of my desk, so nobody can sneak up on me without me being able to hear them.

I have a knack for complicating simple things, but the voices in my head tell me that is better than simplifying complicated things.  Either way, I appreciate those of you who continue to play along.  Just remember, if you choose to dine with the devil it is best to use a long spoon.

You’ve probably figured out that I am never going to be asked to substitute host any of the home improvement shows.  I wasn’t blessed with a mechanical mind, and I have the attention span bordering on the half-life of a gnat.

I’ve noticed that projects involving me and the house have a way of taking on a life of their own.  It’s not the big projects that get me in over my head—that’s why God invented phones, so we can outsource—it’s the little ones, those fifteen minute jobs meant to be accomplished during half-time, between pizza slices.

Case in point—trim touch ups.  Can, brush, paint can opener tool (screwdriver).  Head to the basement where all the leftover paint is stored.  You know exactly where I mean, yours is probably in the same place.  Directions:  grab the can with the dry white paint stuck to the side, open it, give a quick stir with the screwdriver, apply paint, and affix the lid using the other end of the screwdriver.  Back in the chair before the microwave beeps.

That’s how it should have worked.  It doesn’t, does it?  For some reason, you get extra motivated, figure you’ll go for the bonus points, and take a quick spin around the house, dabbing the trim paint on any damaged surface—window and doorframes, baseboards, stair spindles, and other white “things”.  Those of us who are innovators even go so far as to paint over finger prints, crayon marks, and things which otherwise simply needed a wipe down with 409.

This is when it happens, just as you reach for that slice of pizza.  “What are all of those white spots all over the house?”  She asks—you determine who your she is, or, I can let you borrow mine.  You explain that it looks like that simply because the paint is still wet—good response.  To which she tells you the paint is dry—a better response.

“Why is the other paint shiny, and the spots are flat?”

You pause.  I pause, like when I’m trying to come up with a good bluff in Trivial Pursuit.  She knows the look.  She sees my bluff and raises the ante.  Thirty minutes later the game I’m watching is a distant memory.  I’ve returned from the paint store.  I am moving furniture, placing drop cloths, raising ladders, filling paint trays, all under the supervision of my personal chimera.  My fifteen-minute exercise has resulted in a multi-weekend amercement.

This is what usually happens when the plan isn’t tested or isn’t validated.  My plan was to be done by the end of halftime.  Poor planning often results in a lot of rework.  There’s a saying something along the lines of it takes twice as long to do something over as it does to do it right the first time—the DIRT-FIT rule.  And costs twice as much.  Can you really afford either of those outcomes?  Can you really afford to scrimp on the planning part of IT?  The exercise of obtaining HER champions and believers is difficult.  If you don’t come out of the gate correctly, it will be impossible.

Back to my project.  Would you believe me if I said I deliberately messed up?  Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but the one think I know with certainty is that I now have half-times all to myself.