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%.