Triage

Triage is a form of process management that fast tracks patient care in hospitals and healthcare settings. It also is used by companies needing faster workflows for projects under tight deadlines.

Triage refers to the practice of dividing incoming work or customers by priority level so the highest priorities are handled first. Triage is especially important in emergency medical situations such as those seen on the battlefield or following catastrophic civilian accidents. Health care works use medical triage when the number of incoming patients exceeds the normal capacity of the medical center or emergency room. All medical personnel learn triage procedures so that patients with the most serious conditions receive attention first.

Process management is an important part of project management within companies, especially those releasing several products simultaneously. For example, development teams tasked with upgrading software releases now use Agile sprints where the improvements are continuously made and released to customers on rapid timelines. Within the same software company, serious glitches will be discovered by an important customer requiring a fast response to save the business. The software engineers work in a triage manner to prioritize the most important issues as they work through the list of issues.

Most triage process management situations originate with customers, patients or external deadline pressures. For example, book publishers release most of their new titles on a set editorial and production schedule of one year or more, which allows everyone to plan ahead for the timed publication. Publishers also have a system where they can put a project on a fast track schedule through a specialized editorial and marketing triage team. This is most often done with an important political book or celebrity biography where the publisher wants to be first to market.

A risk for medical and business management teams occurs when triage processes start to become the norm. There are temptations once a team proves it can fast track a project to think that all projects can be handled this way. When teams attempt this approach across multiple projects, the end result is almost always a decline in quality and service. Triage by definition must eliminate some of the time-consuming steps seen in best practices processes. For example, a software development team releasing a new product might allocate less quality control hours than normal.

When everything becomes a rush project, staff may become overburdened and demoralized working long hours under constant deadline pressures. This in turn leads to mistakes that a normal process would catch. Effective process management starts at the top and requires sensitivity in determining which projects truly need to be fast tracked and which can run through normal processes. If more and more projects must be fast tracked, then additional labor is typically needed, so there is a cost for every management decision made regarding the need for triage.