Bone Marrow Transplant Service Operations

Brent Giles, Philip Sinyavsky, Josh Binstock

MGT9702 Case 2

Bone Marrow Transplant

Executive Summary

McClelland faces an internal mandate to improve his company's image, and has hit upon a blood marrow transplant donor drive to generate goodwill. His drive requires 1,000 people to submit to cheek swabs and fill out the necessary paperwork, and it must occur within 25 days in order to have full impact. However, at a minimum the project will take 22 days. McClelland must balance the labor requirements of the drive, especially among medical technicians, with the fact that he has very little time buffer. We recommend he begins by staggering training across the five sites he has chosen to reduce spikes in medical tech and other resource needs, then stagger the drives themselves for the same reason. However, if the drive begins to fall behind, he may have to tighten the advertisement and drive schedule to be sure of completing the project on time.

1. How can McClelland effectively create buy-in from his team? In what ways can he get his team on board and invested in the project at Friday’s meeting, and keep the team invested throughout the entire 25-day project?

McClelland can create buy-in from his employees in two ways:

1. Incentivize the process of recruiting volunteers/medics. Award extra vacation days or bonuses to the employees who recruit the most volunteers.
2. McClelland should be educating them about the problem and getting their buy-in using the inherent value of what they're trying to do.

2. Create a precedence diagram for the project. 8

Refer to Page 3 of the Appendix for actual work and data tables.

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3. Create a matrix of activities, following duration and precedence requirements.  

Refer to Page 4 of the Appendix for actual work and data tables.

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4. Create a matrix of labor requirements per day of each activity using the labor requirements table and the duration of each activity, both provided in the case.

Refer to Page 5 of the Appendix for actual work and data tables.

Additional data tables can be found in the Appendix for how we came to these daily totals per Employee Type.

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5. Create an activity schedule that will result in the best leveling of labor requirements without exceeding the time limit of 25 days. Keep in mind McClelland’s preference for the leveling of the individual resource requirements for the three types of workers. You may use “delay and splitting” techniques where appropriate. Activities that cannot be split include training set up, training execution, time it takes to reach the lab, and the public thank-you event. Include a chart for total labor requirements per day as well as cumulative total labor requirements to visually present the resource allocation. Create the same two charts for each of the three types of workers individually.

        We made some optimizations to the provided 22-day initial activity schedule by spreading out some of the tasks to fill the full 25 days but to lessen the resource burden on specific days where it was over-loaded. We delayed tasks C and D to take up the full 5 days each instead of requiring five times the resources on the same day.  We flattened out the resources needed on the 9th day and spread that out to produce an even workload for the entire week.  We are including the graphs for the Daily Resources for all Labor Requirements as well as the Cumulative Daily Resources for all Labor.