2.6 Executive Leadership, Project Lifecycle Changes & Succession Planning

Executive Leadership, Project Lifecycle Changes & Succession Planning

EDAC Core Concept: Healthcare capital projects often take years from strategic planning to post-occupancy evaluation. CHD's current outline asks candidates to describe the role of executive leadership—for both the project and the owner's organization—to understand and champion the EBD process, the policy role of leadership, the responsibilities of the CEO, board, and executive leadership, the changes that occur during the project lifecycle, and the importance of succession planning.

Evidence-based design depends on commitments made early and honored late: funding a researcher, protecting non-negotiable features during value engineering, and paying for a post-occupancy evaluation years after the vision was written. Those commitments survive only when leaders own them.

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What Executive Leaders Do to Champion EBD

The outline lists specific roles for executive leadership:

The Policy Role

Beyond the project, executive leadership has a policy role: establishing the short- and long-term impact of the project related to the social, economic, and environmental considerations that contribute to improved health and safety. Examples include policies on sustainability targets, community access, family presence, and whether results will be shared publicly.

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The CEO, the Board, and Executive Leadership

For the organization as a whole, the outline says the CEO, board of directors, and executive leadership should:

1. Commit to use an evidence-based design process
2. Define the interdisciplinary team's level of decision making
3. Establish organizational and operational strategy and vision
4. Understand the operational implications of design decisions
5. Request development of a project business plan—scope, schedule, budget, and return on investment

EDAC study materials add the governance sequence covered in Section 2.5: the CEO recommends major expenditures and the board approves or disapproves them. Among stakeholders, the CEO is best positioned to cut across departments, keep the organization's values in focus, and shape the culture of EBD efforts.

Board ──► approves strategy, capital, and commitment to EBD
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CEO & executives ──► define team authority, request business plan, champion vision
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Interdisciplinary team ──► develops goals, evidence, hypotheses, design, research plan
  │
Vision keeper ──► keeps decisions consistent with the vision through occupancy

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Changes That Occur During the Project Lifecycle

The outline identifies four kinds of change to anticipate:

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Succession Planning for Continuity, Sustainability & Resilience

The outline asks candidates to understand why succession planning matters for project continuity, sustainability, and resilience. In EBD terms:

• Continuity — the project keeps moving in the same direction when a CNO, project director, or lead architect leaves.
• Sustainability — EBD commitments outlast any one person's enthusiasm.
• Resilience — the team can absorb disruptions without losing hypotheses, baseline data, or research agreements.

Practical tools include naming deputies or co-champions for key roles, keeping a documentation methodology so decisions and their evidence are recorded as members change (a Domain 3 outline item), holding transition briefings before people leave, and writing research and POE commitments into approved plans and agreements rather than relying on verbal promises.

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Worked Scenario: Keeping Commitments Through a Four-Year Project

A regional health system approves a new surgical tower. In year one, the board adopts a policy that the project will use an EBD process and publish post-occupancy results. The CEO requests a project business plan, appoints an interdisciplinary team with defined decision authority, and names the chief nursing officer and a nurse researcher as co-champions.

In year three, the chief operating officer who chaired the steering committee leaves, and the general contractor replaces its project executive. Because the team kept a decision log, an EBD tracking matrix, and a signed research plan, the new leaders receive a two-hour briefing that shows each non-negotiable feature, the evidence behind it, and the baseline data already collected. When a value-engineering proposal targets the ceiling lifts, the new chief operating officer can compare the one-time saving with the intervention's business case instead of starting the debate from scratch.

In year four, the post-occupancy evaluation proceeds as budgeted because the board's policy and the approved research plan—not one person's memory—carried the commitment forward.

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Exam Watch: High-Yield Traps & Pitfalls

[!WARNING] Trap 1: Delegating EBD entirely to the architect. The outline places commitment, team authority, and the request for a business plan with the CEO, board, and executives.

[!WARNING] Trap 2: Business plan vs. business case. Leaders request a project business plan (scope, schedule, budget, ROI); business cases for EBD and for specific interventions are developed by the team (Section 8.3).

[!WARNING] Trap 3: Assuming people stay. Leadership transitions are expected over a long lifecycle; succession planning and documentation are the safeguards.