Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — Memorial Hermann Health System

The scenario

Memorial Hermann Health System broke ground twenty-two months ago on a new 250-bed patient tower at the Texas Medical Center campus in Houston — a $450M capital expansion financed by a 2024 revenue bond issue with a rate-lock covenant that prices in a fixed opening date. The physical building is McCarthy Building Companies' work; the IT infrastructure, biomed integration, and clinical operational readiness that turn an empty building into a functioning hospital is yours. The Office of the CIO holds the IT & Operational Readiness program inside the broader Capital Construction Program; your 27-day window is the final readiness sprint ending at the Ready-for-Patient-Admission gate that the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) inspects against fourteen days before the public opening. The Charter must be approved by Day 6. The parent project is on schedule for the published opening date. Construction owns physical completion; the punch-list is at 11% open items and trending closed. The Cisco DNA-managed network is racked. The Rauland Responder nurse-call heads are in. The Stanley AeroScout RTLS exciters are mounted. The Epic facility-code build is in user-acceptance testing. The 500 super-users are mid-training. Twelve day-in-the-life simulations are scheduled across the next eighteen days, culminating in the four-hour Ready-for-Patient-Admission scenario the day before Closure Gate. What the published plan does not account for — what no published plan can account for — is the regulatory volatility from a peer Houston hospital's ransomware incident now propagating into Texas DSHS interpretive guidance. The bond covenant prices in a fixed opening date. The Gulf hurricane season runs through November and has historically produced two Category-3-or-greater landfalls inside any Memorial Hermann construction window of this length. You do not get to move the date.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Achieve Ready-for-Patient-Admission status for the 250-bed tower at the Day 24 Closure Gate — Texas DSHS hospital licensure inspection passed, Joint Commission pre-survey readiness documented, Houston AHJ Temporary Certificate of Occupancy issued, all life-safety systems commissioned
• →Complete biomed device onboarding for the full 1,400-device scope through Epic BMDI — infusion pumps, vitals monitors, ventilators, telemetry, fetal monitors, anesthesia machines — with sub-2-second time-to-chart for vitals across the medical-surgical floors
• →Commission the seven infrastructure workstreams to operational handover (network, RTLS, nurse call, AV, security, IP phones, biomed) with each having a 14-day post-cutover stabilization window before opening
• →Complete super-user training for 500 clinicians across nursing, physician, pharmacy, lab, respiratory, EVS, and food-service teams with the twelve day-in-the-life simulations executed and the four-hour Ready-for-Patient-Admission scenario ratified by the Chief Nursing Officer
• →Close the program on Day 27 with the operational handover signed by the new tower COO, the parent Capital Construction Program risk register updated, and the post-opening hypercare plan in effect for the fourteen-day window between Day 27 and public opening

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Texas DSHS interpretive bulletin risk — the recent ransomware incident at a peer Houston hospital (HCA-affiliate hospital in The Woodlands) is propagating through the DSHS hospital licensure team's interpretive review; a new bulletin on network segmentation for new construction may land inside the 27-day window and could invalidate the new tower's current network architecture mid-program
• •Hurricane risk — Gulf of Mexico hurricane season runs through November 30 and the mid-October opening puts the program window at peak exposure; historical actuarial guidance puts the probability of a Category-3-or-greater landfall inside any twenty-seven-day fall window at 22%, and Memorial Hermann's Emergency Operations Command activates the system's authority over construction sites at any Category-2 landfall north of Galveston
• •Construction-to-operations handover risk — McCarthy's punch-list is at 11% and trending closed but the final 5% is the load-bearing wall; the gap between construction-complete and operations-ready is where the parent capital project has historically encountered scope battles between construction acceptance criteria and operational readiness standards
• •Bond covenant date risk — the 2024 revenue bond issue's rate-lock prices in a fixed opening date; the CFO has committed in writing not to trigger the Capital Markets Committee notification that a date slip would require, which removes one of the program's traditional escalation paths and forces any compression decisions onto the PM and the SteerCo
• •1,400-device biomed onboarding risk — the Epic BMDI integration scope spans nineteen device manufacturers across six clinical-engineering vendor contracts; manufacturer-side firmware variance has historically produced 8-12% device-onboarding rework even in well-planned activations, and the program plan budgets for 5%

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 9 stakeholders, including Dr. Marcus Whitfield (Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Memorial Hermann Health System), Helen Kestrel (Senior Director, Enterprise PMO — Capital Project Delivery), Beverly Carrasco (Director of Emergency Preparedness & Risk Management, Memorial Hermann Health System), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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