Projects
Methodology
We start from the learning objectives, not from the shopping list. And we run the project to the PMI standard, so that what is agreed at the start is what gets delivered at the end.
On opening day, your centre is perfect. Without a solid methodology, you will find the problems six months later.
That day everything works: the rooms are set up, the team poses for the photo and nobody has a difficult question yet. A simulation centre's failures do not show up at the opening. They show up when it starts being used for real.
The room that cannot be recorded because the network was never sized for it. The simulator still in its box because nobody trained the teaching staff. The debriefing room that ran out of space once the furniture arrived. None of those problems shows up in a quotation, and all three are avoided before anything is signed.
That is why we do not sell a list of equipment. We design a centre and run it as a project: with a written scope, a schedule with dependencies, risks identified before they happen and one person accountable.
That method has a name — the Project Management Institute standard — and we apply it because a simulation centre is exactly the kind of job it was invented for: several suppliers, building works, technology, training and an opening date that does not move.
Getting it wrong during consultancy costs nothing
It is the only point in the project where changing your mind is free. Which is exactly why that is where the thinking belongs.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. A mistake caught in the first phase is erased; the same mistake caught in the last one is inherited. What you pay for in a consultancy is not meeting hours: it is the right to be wrong while it is still cheap.
And that is why we do not sell "an AV system". Selling a product category forces every diagnosis to end in the same prescription. We arrive earlier than that: first what is taught, to whom and with what objectives; then what it takes to achieve it. Sometimes that is a complete audio-video management system, and sometimes it is half a room less and two cameras more.
Copying a centre means copying its mistakes too
Visiting centres is useful and you should do it. Copying them is another matter: what you see solved is the answer to a problem that is not yours.
What you see on the visit
- Eight identical rooms, with the same camera in the same place.
- A central control room from which everything can be seen.
- A high-end simulator in the main room.
- A large, well-appointed debriefing room.
What you don't see
- That they are identical because the budget was closed before anyone knew what would be taught in each one.
- That the control room is central because the building would not let cabling reach the other wing, not because it is better.
- That the simulator was chosen by a procurement call and is used a fraction of the hours.
- That the room is large because space was left over, and that they ended up with nowhere to store anything.
Almost everything you see in a centre that works is a solution to one specific constraint: a column, a budget, a syllabus, an argument three years ago. Copied somewhere else, that solution stops solving anything — and still costs the same.
And what gets copied most easily is the mistake, because the mistake is precisely what nobody shows you on the visit. We have seen both — in centres we designed and in centres we were called in to fix. That accumulated memory is the other half of what you buy in a consultancy.
Years spent selling simulators guarantee nothing
We have been at this for years too, which is why we can say it: seniority measures how long a company has been open, not how many centres it has got working. These are three better questions.
Centres like mine, or individual units?
Selling a thousand simulators to a thousand different buyers does not teach you how to design a centre. Ask about complete projects, with their building works and their commissioning — not about turnover or catalogue size.
By what method, and who is accountable?
Ask to see a plan, a risk register and a set of minutes. If they do not exist, the project is being run from memory — and running it from memory works fine until the day somebody falls ill.
What happens in year two?
Ask who their clients called eighteen months after the opening, and what happened next. It is the one reference that cannot be dressed up in a slide deck.
And you should want to pay for it
Not for commercial reasons. For two reasons that protect you.
What you don't pay for, you can't hold anyone to
A study given away commits nobody. If the result is no good, there is no deliverable to review, no deadline to miss and nobody to hold to account: it was a favour. A contract turns an opinion into a commitment.
And in the public sector it weighs even more: a free study from a supplier who then bids compromises the tender and opens the door to a conflict of interest. Separating the study from the purchase protects the procurement file — and protects whoever signs it.
And it moves responsibility to whoever answers for it
When the centre is designed by the clinical or teaching lead themselves — their judgement, their time, their signature — the failure is theirs too. If the room turns out too small or the system does not record, the question at the committee does not go to a supplier: it goes to them.
Contracting the project out externalises both the process and the responsibility. You supply the learning objectives, which is the one thing nobody can supply for you. The rest we sign for.
How a project is ordered
Four phases and one band running across them. It is the same path you will see on any of our centre case studies.
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1
Consultancy
What is taught today, to how many students and with what learning objectives.
When the phase closes A written, accepted scope: what is in, what is out and the criteria for calling it finished.
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2
Project
Spaces, flows and the power, communications and audio infrastructure.
When the phase closes A plan with milestones and dependencies, an itemised budget and the risk register opened.
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3
Implementation
Installation, commissioning and training of the teaching team.
When the phase closes An acceptance record per unit and the training delivered, with the centre running in front of you.
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4
Support and maintenance
After the opening, which is when the centre actually starts being used.
When the phase closes It does not close: a support contract with remote assistance, corrective work on your premises and scheduled interventions.
Monitoring and control Not a fifth phase: it runs underneath all four, from start to finish.
- A progress report covering what is done, what is outstanding and what has drifted.
- Change control: nothing enters or leaves the scope without being put in writing.
- A living risk register, reviewed at every milestone.
- A single point of contact on our side, from the first meeting to the last.
What goes wrong in a centre, said before it happens
None of these is hypothetical. They are the ones that come up again and again, and every one of them is decided during the design phase.
The building works run late
The opening date almost never moves, and the equipment arrives regardless. Temporary storage, insurance and the installation sequence all end up improvised.
What we do Explicit float in the plan and an installation sequence that allows deliveries without blocking the works.
The network cannot cope
Recording several rooms in parallel is sustained traffic, not peaks. If it runs over the hospital's or the university's general network it competes with everything else — and the IT department has rules of its own.
What we do It is sized during the design phase and agreed with IT beforehand, not on installation day.
There aren't enough power sockets
A simulation room is not a classroom. You have to power the simulator, the compressor, the monitors, the cameras, the instructor's station and the chargers for all of the above. They get planned as classrooms and fall short on day one.
What we do They are counted per scenario and per station, not per square metre, and spares are left over.
The one-way mirror doesn't work
A one-way mirror only works if the observed side is clearly brighter than the observer's side. With the lights on in the control room, or a night-time case in the scenario, it stops being a mirror and becomes a window: the student sees the instructors.
What we do The glass is designed together with the lighting of both rooms and its controls, not as a piece of joinery.
Cables across the floor and extension leads
It is the symptom of conduits that were never planned. And in a room where people run to attend a cardiac arrest, a cable across the floor is not just about looks: it is a trip hazard, and it is in every shot you record.
What we do Conduits, floor boxes and cable routes are decided with the furniture and the scenario in front of us.
The teaching team doesn't use it
It is the most expensive failure and the least visible: it gives no warning, the rooms simply get booked very little. It usually comes from training left until the end, or given to people who were never going to teach.
What we do Training sits inside the scope, and acceptance is signed with the centre running — not with the equipment delivered.
Three centres, the same method
The figures are each project's own, not examples.
CISARC · Universidad de Manresa
Hospital da Luz Lisboa · Learning Health
Universidad Europea de Madrid
Tell us what you want to teach
Tell us what you teach, to how many students and with what objectives, and we will be with you from the study through to commissioning. The first conversation commits you to nothing.