Team Building through the missing CAT!

In 1995 Greenslopes Private Hospital was drawn through a rough process of being privatised. I started not long after this and ended up as the Qld ICT Manager.

Late in 2000 (after Y2K had come and gone like a wet rag) Ramsay Health Care went through some internal turmoil with the centralization of internal services down to Sydney.

With inter hospital turmoil happening, and intra departmental turmoil going on it was moral was down, specifically in the Finance and ICT areas.

A small group (of 2) designed a team building exercise, without even releasing the extent the exercise was going to reach.

The IT Help Desk was the central point of issue management for ICT. When difficult customers called, professionalism and persistence was paramount to understand and by emphatic to the caller. When they got off the phone a lovely little stuffed cat took the consequences of the caller. It was thrown, kicked, slapped, squeezed, hugged and cried upon. It was loved.

One Monday the stuff cat walked; IT VANISHED. In turmoil the help desk searched, blamed and were dismayed as they were unable to find it. A week later an email appeared with a picture of cat, sitting on a printer. This went on for days with pictures from all around the hospital. The team was building cases of evidence, printer types, room types, sun positioning. Finance got on board, they had their own ideas on where the cat was, and each was investigated.

The pictures grew, different hospital came into the game! Now the teams brought in their counterparts in Sydney and Perth! These were the very same people, just a few weeks earlier, that had been arguing and disgusted with each other as roles were split and centralised.

Another week past, team meeting took on a new turn, a standing agenda item of the CAT update.

It was a month into this that one bright spark turned on monitoring of all printer queues across all Hospitals (even through this strained infrastructure resources, we let it happen as it did not compromise confidentiality). Then it happen, someone printed a jpeg with the word ‘cat’ in the name. The Cat, as one commonly states, was out of the bag……

"Moral, when the borders are broken down, and the conflict is removed, we can all work for a common cause." 

David Camus, Program Director, LKT Consulting.