Case-studies

Case Studies

Agile Projects

 

Troubled project recovery

 

Claims Management Company Successfully
Completes Massive M&A Initiative Using Haplen
The company expanded considerably by successfully integrating over 10,000 new customers, building two new call centers, and doubling the number of claims served – all while fulfilling program deadlines, contractual responsibilities, and growing revenues by more than 30%.

Company

The client, a leading Asia provider of claims and productivity management solutions, provides claims, productivity, managed care, risk consulting, and other services to clients in the United States and Canada. Workers’ compensation, disability, FMLA, and other employee absence; managed care; general, automotive, and professional liability; warranty and credit card claims services; fraud and investigation; structured settlements; and Medicare-compliance solutions are among the company’s specialties.

Challenge

The corporation was in the midst of a massive business growth that comprised the simultaneous acquisition of five organizations. One purchase required the merger of 26 independent client companies as well as a software development effort to transition these enterprises to the client’s corporate standards and best practices. At the halfway point of the implementation, the project was behind schedule and over budget. Continuing on this path would have resulted in the loss of crucial clients and revenue, as well as a much worse return on investment for the acquisition and development program.p>

In the midst of this transformative growth, senior management wanted to improve overall project management through better monitoring, control, and reporting while ensuring critical deliverables and targets were met.

Solution

Haplen solutions were employed by the organization to provide project management and consultation. Haplen offered many significant recommendations and supported the delivery of these projects on several fronts after reviewing the health of the various programs:

  • The project team centralized all decision-making responsibility in the project sponsor for the major purchase, selected a technology champion, and improved understanding of roles and duties by developing a formal responsibility matrix. These steps highlighted accountability and responsibility at all levels of the project, boosting decision making as well as the project team’s delivery performance.
  • For thel client, Haplen offered a senior program manager to oversee the installation of claims administration services. They collaborated to integrate and coordinate different work streams from the business, operations, marketing, implementation, real estate, and technology departments. An integrated program level master plan was prepared, as well as standardized documentation for individual work stream reporting and sharing with other team members.
  • Haplen provided mentoring and formal training to all of the company’s project managers involved in the program initiatives, with the goal of strengthening critical monitoring and control areas like meeting management, communications, and project artifact content. Over 100 coworkers attended the training and took advantage of the project toolbox created specifically for them.
  • An agile methodology was used to improve the development effort supporting the acquisition, with an emphasis on enhancing the business requirements description. Better solutioning, testing, and traceability resulted from the revised requirements formulation process, and the program was eventually finished with 100% customer retention.

Results

With Haplens’ experienced direction, the company was able to harness common project management concepts and tactics and adapt them to the company’s specific needs. As a result of the successful organizational transformation, more than 1,000 additional clients were integrated, two call centers were opened, and the number of claims served was doubled – all while achieving program deadlines and contractual responsibilities.

  • 1. The overall acquisition program was reset and successfully recovered, with all of the new targets and milestones achieved within eight months.
  • 2. For the company’s new retail client, two new call centers went live as scheduled including renovation of new facilities, development of client-specific policies and procedures, hiring new colleagues, and installation of infrastructure to support the centers.
  • 3. For the development effort, a team consisting of Business, Practice, and Technology colleagues was assembled. Once the team was comfortable with the agile process, the development targets were reset, creating more realistic target dates and deliverables.

These collaborative actions were successfully implemented in parallel with the help of PM Solutions, allowing the company to achieve the desired return on investment of the acquisitions, increasing corporate revenues by 30%.

Agile Projects

Automotive Manufacturer Slashes HR Service Costs by 66% in Just Seven Months
Within seven months of program completion, HR expenses were reduced from US $20 million to $6.8 million per year.

 

Company

This company’s customer base includes practically every major manufacturer in the worldwide automotive, commercial vehicle, and off-highway markets, since it is a multibillion-dollar global leader in manufacturing automotive components.

Challenge

As the company emerged from bankruptcy, its Human Resources (HR) officials sought to minimize service expenses, which were averaging US $20 million per year. They devised a strategy to “right-source” essential human resources operations that had previously been outsourced to a single contractor. The corporation anticipated to improve HR services while drastically reducing costs by bringing the majority of services back in-house and working with a variety of best-in-class service providers for select components of the program. The HR Transformation Program includes 15 discrete projects in all, spanning all facets of HR service delivery, such as Payroll,
Benefits, Health and Welfare, and Pensions.

However, after eight months, the entire initiative was in risk. Key project milestones and deliverables were not being fulfilled, and crucial cost overruns were piling up. With only four months left to complete the whole HR Transformation Program, the CIO discovered that the organization lacked the program management experience necessary to accomplish the desired results.

Solution

The CIO asked PM Solutions to take over program management oversight for the HR Transformation Program on a Thursday evening. The next Monday morning, PM Solutions dispatched the first of two world-class Program Managers to turn the difficult initiative around. This effort necessitated expert interface management between the customer, the departed service provider, and a slew of new service providers. Tensions between stakeholders were high, and managing expectations was vital to success. The veteran consultants reset client/vendor requirements, milestones, resource predictions, estimates, and delivery targets using PM Solutions’ patented Project Review and Recovery methodologies.

Results

The program’s 15 projects were completed on time and on budget, with no service delays or outages throughout the pilot, transition, or go-live phases.

Within seven months of program completion, the client had reduced HR expenses from US $20 million to $6.8 million per year, and is targeted for a $5 million per year run rate.

Because of the success of this endeavor, PM Solutions has continued to work with this client to develop an organizational project management methodology, mature portfolio management processes, and assist in improving project execution across the organization.

Agile Projects

 

Insurance Company Cuts Cycle Time by 20% and Saves Nearly $5 Million Using Haplen Agile Project Management Practices

 

Project durations have been cut by 20%, resulting in a net savings of roughly $5 million. The percentage of projects completed on schedule and under budget has grown by 40%. As a result, management expanded the scope of the effort to
integrate agile techniques throughout the firm.

 

 

Company

A US-based Fortune 100 company providing insurance products and services to clients in North America.

Challenge

With a billion-dollar project portfolio containing hundreds of projects, the client needed to reduce time-to-market in order to respond to competitive demands and its expanding product line. Over a three-year period, they established aggressive goals to lower average project length by around 50% and boost internal customer satisfaction by 25%. At the time, the client’s project management environment was inflexible, relying nearly entirely
on traditional phase-based delivery timelines with a heavy development process.

Solution

The client implemented the Scrum framework and other agile product development methodologies in the hope of benefiting from the reduced project durations promised by an iterative methodology. As part of this program, the company planned to bring radically new management approaches to a historically trained project management community, with a focus on early and frequent delivery of value to end-users.

During the early stages of this project, PM Solutions became a vital member of an internal group that provided agile coaching to teams using agile development approaches, as well as training adapted to their specific context.

PM Solutions also guided the client’s project management organization through the various modifications that these new techniques demanded of an organization that had been trained in traditional methods.

Results

After 18 months of mentoring and coaching, a number of significant results were realized:

  • Average project duration (cycle time) was reduced by approximately 20%, for a net savings of nearly $5 million
  • Customer satisfaction improved nearly 30% (exceeding the goal of 25%), 18 months ahead of projections
  • Project startup duration decreased from an average of 10 weeks to 3 weeks
  • Time-to-first-solution implementation decreased from an average of 20 weeks to 7 weeks
  • 90% of projects adopting agile practices and techniques now deliver the desired value to end-users on-time and within initial budgets – by contrast, with traditional approaches, only 50% of projects delivered desired value on-time and within initial budgets.

Approximately 15% of the client’s project portfolio now uses some type of agile project management. The client has developed strategic goals that formalize the ambition to “go agile” across the business as a result of demonstrated success employing a combination of agile project management and development approaches. As a result, management has demanded that the percentage of projects
adopting agile approaches be doubled.

PM Solutions continues to assist in the leadership of coaching and mentoring initiatives aimed at further ingraining agile concepts into the company’s business processes.

Managing Complex Projects

 

Telecommunications Company

 

 

A HIGHLY COMPLEX NETWORK

 

One of client’s strategic clients requested that the company replace its outdated network with a highly competent, fully managed Global Local Area Network (GLAN) in 42 distinct locations across the world at the end of 2017.

By November 2019, the client customer program delivery project team hoped to have completed the project. The deal was for a period of five years.

Risk assessment workshops were held at the start of the project, which experts identified as being extremely complicated.

A network failure may occur during any implementation, which constitutes a high-severity risk. This could result in a lack of service at any of the customer’s facilities or locations, disrupting production lines and resulting in millions of euros in losses.

SCHEDULE PRESSURE FROM THE START

Due to a delay in contract sign-off, staying on track with the scheduled schedule was a worry. As a result of the delay, many design changes happened before the project was baselined, and the client was forced to tolerate these changes until they reached a final agreement with the
customer on the design.

THe client is one of the world’s major telecommunications companies, with mobile operations in 24 countries, partnerships with mobile networks in 42 more, fixed broadband service in 19 markets, and a total user base of more than 500 million.

KEY RESULTS

  • 10/10 Net Promoter Score from customer
  • On-time delivery
  • Cost savings in resource budget

SOLUTION :

Due to the project’s complexity, the project management team was required to work on creating a common agreed-upon approach for project delivery.

The project team held a series of workshops with the technical solution architects, which resulted in effectively categorizing the customer’s sites around the world and deciding on a standard delivery approach for each category depending on its importance.

Using Haplen’s project management approach:

  • Suppliers participated in workshops to agree on the resources included in the resource management plan.
  • A portion of the project money was set aside to conduct a walkthrough of the customer’s top priority sites.
  • A communication strategy was devised to ensure timely and effective communication.
  • A formal change management procedure was developed.
  • Customized project documentation was prepared to report on and control the delivery’s progress.
  • To track all risks and issues within the project, a customized risk management plan and an issue log were created.
  • Dependence and impact were assessed
  • A regular project analysis as well as a governance model were established and agreed upon.
  • Instead of capturing lessons learned at the end of the project, the project team committed to capture them on a regular basis.

RESULTS:

ON-TIME PROJECT DELIVERY WITH COST SAVINGS

The first set of customer site migrations to the new GLAN was completed with a 90 percent success rate, and all sites migrated successfully on the second attempt.

The client GLAN project was successfully delivered on time and ahead of the team’s target completion dates.

Through the use of proven project management waterfall methodologyI:

  • The customer gave the client a 10/10 Net Promoter Score (NPS).
  • The client was able to deliver the project on time.
  • The client had cost savings in the resources budget.
  • The project team captured the lessons learned to be used as a best practice for other future GLAN projects.

“Our project team worked with the customer to understand how the solution would benefit their business. Then using the Haplen platform, they implemented the solution on time with high quality.”

– Head of Customer Design & Deliverys