Tera L. Webb, PhD, MLS(ASCP)^CM

Laboratory professionals are trained deeply in the science and technical operations of the laboratory. Management is different. New managers and directors are suddenly responsible for people, quality, operations, finances, competing priorities and organizational relationships — often without having had a place to practice managing those responsibilities together.

It gives learners an operating laboratory in which they must interpret what is happening, determine what deserves attention and make management decisions before those responsibilities are real.

The goal is to help laboratory professionals see the whole system — not just the individual management topics within it.

In 2019, I attended a management education conference where I saw an instructional model built around students operating a business rather than simply studying one. They entered an organization, took on responsibilities and made decisions.

The question was immediate: what would that look like in laboratory management education?

The first version of Lab Command was not software. It was a fictional laboratory — its departments, people, operating conditions and management problems. The work began with cases, but isolated cases could not show how one decision affected another part of the laboratory.

That is when the idea shifted from a collection of cases to an interconnected management simulation.