Project Turnaround - Case Study 4:

The Client Need: Restart a failing health insurance carrier's high-priority project

To centralize, protect, and streamline data on its policyholders, a health insurance company decided to develop a state-of-the-art data center from the ground up. The multi-million-dollar project was critical to the company's operations and integral to minimizing liability exposures. Multiple call centers would rely upon information stored in the data center to handle customer questions and issues quickly and accurately.

Management determined delivery dates and began to plan around the expectation that the center would be in operation by those dates. However, the project lacked real schedule dates and a clearly understood scope. In addition, while the executive team recognized the importance of the call center, there was not a real sponsor within the company.

The project began in an ad hoc manner, and started stumbling almost immediately. Communication was poor, and leadership was not well-defined. As management watched the project team struggle, they realized it was likely that the delivery dates would be missed.

We were brought in to get the project back on track, and our first step was to apply a proprietary assessment model that helped us determine the current state of the project, what would be required to get it moving forward efficiently, and realistic expectations for delivery. After presenting a summary of our assessment, we developed an aggressive plan for completing the project, and presented it to the insurer's CIO to ensure that we had executive-level support.

With that support, we created new baselines for the project and developed realistic schedules for each step. We placed an emphasis on improved communication, and established a structure to facilitate sharing of information across the team and to executives. We tracked the plan through every step, right to completion and closure.

In the end, the project was completed on time and under budget. The data center went into use immediately, operated as designed through testing and rollout, and continued to serve as the company's backbone years later.