Business Focus - Marketing - Medical Insurance Services

The medical insurance business has been adapting regularly and quickly to both marketplace and regulatory changes. There has been a need to keep track of all work to positively help customers with their medical coverage needs and to meet government compliance demands. The seasonal occurrences of employer related annual enrollment processes have created high-peak work periods that would be hard to track without automation.

This customer developed management practices to successfully keep up with these conditions. They developed an organizational structure that separated marketing and compliance. They used a custom legacy work management solution built on FileMaker to track the work. The system, however, encountered an end-of-life period where the existing platform needed significant upgrades to continue supporting the business. This created an opportunity for the customer to explore alternative platforms, one of which was Workfront.

Challenge

This implementation team’s primary challenge was the successful retirement of a legacy work management platform without interruption to current business processing. The customer determined a need to implement based on a several phased elements: pilot (early adopters), general deployment (early majority), and post-deployment (later majority). They needed to plan the phased implementations around their high-peak open enrollment periods; no system changes were allowed during these periods. The legacy system had a usage expiration deadline date. And the customer had a history of regularly changing organizational structures to meet business cycle changes. Lastly, COVID-19 occurred, creating an over-whelming disruption to the business, where a SaaS solution like Workfront became required.

Solution

Workfront - The Platform

The Workfront platform was configured to accommodate the many requirements associated with the business supporting legacy system. The two major groups (marketing and compliance) were implemented to accommodate the related request categories. Access and navigation categories were used to handle the varied processing and data interaction needs of planners, workers, leaders, and requesters. The customer’s processing matured to leverage the resource management functions. Reports and dashboards were first implemented with common usage across groups of users. More were later created to meet the needs of each leader based on their respective business category and reporting structure ownership.

Organizational Change Management

The customer was well-prepared for the level of planning and effort associated with a system migration. They were eager to develop the new processes based on ideas of the existing system, but with improvements. They expected to associate changes between the platforms based on classes of users broken into the operating groups and based on readiness to change. They structured just-in-time training for the new system based on the new processes aligned with the legacy mapped functions / job roles. They also staged the implementations around the open enrollment periods and the COVID-19 disruption.

Systems Change Management

A system change management practice was implemented early during the implementation efforts. Workfront change requests were entered into a Workfront request queue. These requests provided insight to the problem being solved. The Workfront administrators used the requests to keep track of the resolutions including details on environment changes, communication needs, and known obstacles to remember. These records became essential when attempting to understand processing requirements changes, environment shifts, training obstacles, and other categories. The records also helped with the transition of Workfront administration duties.

Benefits

This team successfully replaced their legacy environment into Workfront. They were able to leverage a common workflow based on the following:

• Make a request in a request queue.

• Review the request detail, approve request, and decide if a project is needed. If a project is not needed, work and close the request.

• As needed, convert request to project using a template of tasks.

• Plan and resource management the tasks.

• Execute the tasks.

• Finish up the project and close it.

• Settle or communicate finish work to the requester.

This customer started to exploit the data being collected. A series of reports and dashboards were assembled to provide insights to the following:

• Who is involved with projects (and tasks) based on who reports to whom throughout a reporting relationships matrix expanding beyond a manager, group, or team.

• Fulfillment analyses on the regulatory compliance for documents being on-time, within limits, or late.

• Chargeback processing including estimating and invoicing formats using custom forms.

• Enterprise project typing using independent group project types and shared enterprise project types.

This customer’s planning group evolved the processing into advanced resource management.

• The compliance group used a pick-up or self-assign bin processing model where tasks were assigned by role. The assignments were picked up in reports to represent simulated paper inboxes for the next step in a process. The users would go to the report for their role and self-assign the next item to work on.

• The marketing group used Workfront’s resource management functions. The planners set up their task schedules based on a prioritization practice. Once the plan was refined, they requested help from the resource planner. The resource planner slotted the work across users and schedules using the Workload Balancer and Scheduler functions. Changes to projects required a pause and reset of the tasks, assignments, and schedules.