Select Projects that Highlight our Capabilities
Client: Healthcare Provider
Client Request: Streamline collection and processing of edits to provider profile data as well as creation of new profile records
Pain-Point: Inbound data is not controlled, so analysts must continually engage in inefficient dialogue with over 60 field agents. A new, downstream, system has higher data-quality requirements that do not tolerate any ambiguous or replicated data.
Solution: First Phase: MS Word form design and VB Script development for data import into Excel. Later Phase: Design & development of a database with a macro-driven interface that addressed key operational use cases.
Engagement: Comprehensive client interviews and process documentation. Executed ETL, SQL and VB Script development for merging national provider data with internal contract records. Designed and developed a case management database to manage the provider profile updates and creates. Extended the functionality of the system to enable the client to self-manage the system’s configuration to stay in sync with the downstream system’s periodic updates. Developed UAT documentation and executed QA and training.
Result: System and procedures are now used by 4 analysts and over 60 agents to provide accurate updates to provider profile data. The system contributed to reducing a 3-4 week cycle time to 24 hours and reduced re-work by 95%.
Client: Financial Institution
Client Request: Streamline the collection, validation and disposition of business intelligence data and transformation.
Pain Point: Process is dominated by error-prone copy-paste operations. All of the submissions’ coordination is executed by email with little standardization in structure or baseline requirements. Delivery expectations are not established across organizations; causes tension between stakeholders. Role normalization is poorly enforced for intake procedures, causing overlap of efforts and orphaned deliverables. Overall, the process requires exemplary project management skills and excessive attention to detail for every submission.
Solution: Centralize the communication on a collaboration platform. Deploy a multi-user case management tool.
Engagement: Shadowed the operations manager for a 4 weeks and documented all processes and use cases. Interviewed all analysts interfacing with upstream stakeholders. Documented the roll-up of departmental project status to management and team. Attended weekly departmental status calls and summary messaging. Developed specifications for a Sharepoint system. Managed refinement of requirements with Sharepoint developer and built models for management approval. Determined resource rationalization. Developed policies for role enforcement. Documented use cases into UML diagrams. Developed case management system (2 –users) in an MS Access database. Developed MS Word form input for enforcing rational and consistent values from analysts.
Results: Client proceeded to deploy the Sharepoint environment and roll it out to the team. Analyst team accepted a policy governing data quality, diminishing re-work and error management by over 50%. Intake processing was reduced 66% to 24 hours. Operations manager was able to re-focus time to focus on addressing complex cases. Role rationalization for operations initiated a larger re-organization to optimize the department’s mission and distribute the risk across redundant stakeholders.
Client: Financial Startup
Client Request: Provide guidance and structure in the analysis to determine the most optimal vendor for an HRIS solution. An ROI analysis and “opportunity” argument was needed for executive approval.
Pain Point: Besides the many pain-points associated internal processes, the client had a relatively inexperienced staff and had never selected an integrated, complex system. This was a significantly consequential decision and they didn’t have the skills to make it.
Solution: A systematic process of client interviews, process deconstruction, questionnaires and use-case validation.
Engagement: All representative stakeholders were engaged. As-Is pain-points were identified in the context of process flows. Time-assessments were made against all desk-level procedures and issue-resolution scenarios. These were merged with salary data to build a present-cost / future-cost assessment and define the client’s ROI. Vendors’ features were assessed at a top-level for fit and client consideration using the interview results for guidance. A comprehensive RFP was executed with the top vendor candidates. A weighted gap analysis was executed across 13 operational categories.
Result: Client was successfully informed on their needs and how well the top vendor candidates will be able to accommodate them via a phased rollout. Executives were effectively informed on the significantly-positive ROI for the investment. Client proceeded to engage a plan to enhance their workforce to prepare for the necessary resource requirements of a company-wide deployment.
Client: Networking Technology Enterprise
Client Request: A new, online support community was being deployed. Management needed KPI’s defined to continually justify the program. Line management needed weekly business intelligence data to assess programs, execute A-B analyses, and determine root causes of fluctuation in demand. Budget was limited and existing analytics tools were to be leveraged where appropriate.
Pain Point: Client relied upon vendor’s analytics data. This was a log file based instrumentation which was exposed to non-human traffic such as search engines, scripts and spam attacks. Because this was a collaboration community there was also an entire category of metrics associated with user-contributions that was neither instrumented nor tracked. Most critically, the case deflection analysis (for ongoing ROI assessment) required identifying traffic from paying-customers which required coordination with internal profile systems.
Solution: No vendor was available that addressed requirements comprehensively, so a suite of internal and open-source solutions were assembled and built around a semi-automated operation.
Engagement: (Phase 1) Web analytics tags were instrumented on all pages and tuned to capture profile identities and employer. A Pentaho ETL platform was deployed to import and parse contribution data. An MS Access database was deployed on a shared drive to merge post-processed data. An MS Excel was linked to the MS Access database to generate graphic and tabular output. Scripts were designed to generate graphic files that were posted to the client’s internal wiki engine. Macros were built to automate the weekly-update process. (Phase2) Client moved to a Jive Software platform. Vendor’s analytics were inadequate and inaccurate. Site was instrumented with Unica web analytics tags that included key user profile values. A Pentaho ETL platform was configured to import the analytics data and extract all collaboration metrics. The same ETL platform pulled the post-processed data from Unica and combined it with the collaboration data on a ProgreSQL database. The database was made available to a Tableau UI for report configuration.
Result: The program’s senior management was able to cost justify increasing investment and doubled the team size over 2 years and expand into 4 new languages. The support site won industry awards for innovation three years in a row while under contract. Line managers for 21 communities were able to review their communities’ metrics on a weekly basis and used the data for ongoing improvements in their daily operations and strategy.
Client: Insurance Provider
Client Request: Re-engineer the product development processes for integration into a new case management tool.
Pain Point: The client’s product development processes were ad-hoc and poorly understood. Decades of institutional procedures were not documented and all knowledge was closely held by key employees.
Solution: (Phase 1) Executive mandate to document existing processes. (Phase 2) Deconstruct essential processes and propose solutions for review and approval.
Engagement: 8 SME’s were identified and allocated to the project full time. Collaborated with client stakeholders while process diagrams were developed on a whiteboard. Scope definition quickly became a critical goal to define as the processes were extending far into operations outside of the scope of the program. Functional groupings of processes were identified and as-is documentation was developed at the appropriate level of depth given the open-scope issue.
Result: Due to the results of documenting the processes, the client realized that the PMO had not scoped the project adequately. The entire program was halted, the vendor’s consultants terminated, and the PMO reconstituted under new management.
Client: Logistics Startup
Client Request: Build a Product Management department.
Pain Point: This startup had no processes in place, nor any organization to manage them. Costly consultants had been hired to execute the initial product development, but there was little guidance nor robust strategy.
Solution: Assess and improve strategy, identify resource requirements at each phase, establish a program management office.
Engagement: Collect details on all projects to be considered. Build a roadmap based by collaborating with executives to determine least challenging path towards sustainability and sequence project rollouts. Assess resource requirements for each project. Establish internal program & project management processes and establish project status reporting infrastructure. Execute hiring to fulfill resource requirements in a phased manner.
Result: Hired and managed a 14-person team to oversee the development and project management for the Single-Sign-On security infrastructure, payment settlement service, customer-facing business intelligence dashboard and website. Managed the contractual operations with three consulting firms. Managed the relationship with the company’s technology partners. Brought 6 software licenses into compliance. Collaborated with Marketing to develop and negotiate press releases with partners. Negotiated contracts with software vendors resulting in cost savings of more than $800K
Client: Healthcare Startup
Client Request: Upgrade their platform.
Pain Point: The client had no control over customers' internal data collection procedures, but still needed to ingest their data and provide accurate analytics. Much data was manually edited and prone to formatting and value-level errors that would break the ETL workflows. Their analysts were spending most of their time tracking down the root causes, often delaying critical end-of-month/quarter reporting. Management could not take on new clients until this was resolved.
Solution: Design a customer-facing system that provides realtime feedback on file and value-level issues that the customer can immediately address themselves.
Engagement: An Managed File Transfer (MFT) application was identified as a front-end solution for the customer interface. The system needed robust workflow capability that addressed all filetypes exposed to manual editing, and thus errors. A vendor selection process was engaged and Linoma Software's GoAnywhere MFT was selected. Process designs were developed for every filetype permutation and scenario. Incremental QA results were passed to a portal interface so that the user could see the ingestion progress in a realtime manner. Data was extracted from every filetype, regardless of internal format, and inserted into automatically-generated tables for a downstream ETL to process.
Result: Management was able to re-assign resources away from troubleshooting customer data issues. Customers could observe and fix issues immediately, increasing their satisfaction with the operation. Management could pursue sales with new customers without losing existing customers. Investors saw a scalable operation and critical funding was secured.