Shared systemic language strengthens expertise across disciplines

Simone Behr, Functional Manager, Health IT at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH)

“At Aarhus University Hospital, Health IT plays a central role because our purpose is to support the hospital’s many clinical and administrative workflows through digitalisation and data application. What makes our department unique is that our employees have a wide range of professional backgrounds, such as IT specialists, engineers, nurses, project managers, medical secretaries and more. We lacked a common language regarding our consultancy roles and in our dialogue with the outside world. Therefore, a large part of our staff has completed Mannaz’s systemic process consultancy training, which has strengthened their consultancy competencies.

We are highly skilled in our IT systems and technical expertise, but by enhancing our competencies as process consultants, we now have a broader toolbox for facilitating, advising and executing. We send all our consultants to the training course, and it gives us a shared language and sense of security. We clearly experience that we can hold each other accountable in these competencies and use them directly and actively in our daily work.

Specifically, we’ve revitalised our decentralised network of super users across the hospital, and we’ve used many process tools to engage with them and understand what we can do differently and better. We’ve learned to ask curious questions and to understand the many different stakeholders and their relationship to the hospital’s professional and digital processes. I clearly see that we’ve become more reflective. We are especially pleased with the methods we’ve learned regarding change processes and people’s reactions to change. Now we prepare better, think through scenarios and have a toolbox full of tools we can use when encountering different tasks and people. It’s all worth it.”