Training needs
Here is a typical project scenario...
Project development is done. Your policy and claims systems are fully configured, tested and are nearing deployment. The Client Organization has spent lots of money in developing the system. The Early business testing event that was sponsored for the end users, business users, agents, adjusters etc made them feel comfortable with the application and its features.
Their feedback so far -
- System looks good, why would i need training?
- I know what i need and how to get there in the System.
- I will look for training needs as and when i require.
- I don't think its worth the time and money to train other people especially after receiving good feedback from this focus business testing group.
These and some other similar responses is what we hear when we talk to busines users about training.
Of course, this is not the case everywhere, some users know the system better than others, some know all the quirks and work aorunds that exist in the system,but overall, somewhere at the bottom of their heart this is the common feeling with most of the business users.
There are some organizations who are fully and completely aware of the importance of training needs.
Training Advantages
Why do we need to get trained on the system
Similar understanding
When the project implementation team lays out the project roadmap, it plans for requirements, design, development, testing and implementation phases. It is equally important to have a training milestone in place, with the objective that all users are on the same page wrt system usage, understanding the attributes and functional quirks.
Change Management
Training forms a very important component of change management. It helps cultivate the importance of the implementation at the grass root levels and helps bring a feeling of oneness within the organization by addressing the issues, problems faced and the solutions proposed therein.
Benefit bottomline costs
Last and most important, Project success is dependant by the success of the implementation and the use of the application thereafter.
If the system implementation involves improvements to the business process and operational activities then training will help increase this awareness, bring a common understanding of the whole process.
It will also help strengthen and highlight the executive direction and perspective behind the implementation.
Training will thus improve the overall efficiency of the end users. This definitely will help to improve your bottomline benefits.
Training Objectives
What do we wish to attain from the training. The Objectives should be clear. Some examples
- It should address the training needs and issues faced by each and every user per the job functions.
To absorb and implement the functionality useful for your day to day operations (e.g. corresponding using System activities/dairies/notes rather than communicating via other time consuming and disconnect methods like hard copies, emails - which are outside the system)
- Make sure that the training is scalable in terms of the organization size
.
- Ensure the trained colleagues understand and propagate the platform and application features to their peers and try to answer their queries. If a question cannot be answered by them, let it be directed to members of the training cell or to the right personnel
Plan and prepare
There is no one size fit all solution here. For example, for a policy implementation you will need separate training modules for customer service, operations, underwriters, managers and supervisors so that each group can perform their job functions efficiently and effectively.
Along with having a separate training module, the training should be such that it meets requirements for candidates for all levels of understanding. e.g.
- Some users may not know the difference between backspace key on the computer vs the delete key
- Some users may understand bits and pieces of the application functionality, but not end to end
- Some users may be used to navigating through, by having worked on similar such applications in their prior jobs or past life
- Some users may just not want to change from System A to System B - reluctance to change
Hence there is a big component of change management that goes hand in hand with training
Before preparing your training material have one on one sessions with each groups of users as identified above and understand their specific training needs and requirements. Come up with a script that actually answers their questions.
The training sessions once done should be followed by a brief Q&A or if it is online have an assessment at the end to make sure the general understanding and the average grasp of training by the audience.
Training Methods
The various training options can be
Online training
This is an online computer based training. It serves as a self paced learning module where the trainee will study the application features as and how they find time and at their own pace and speed.
Hands on or classroom training with a fixed schedule
This is an instructor based training where people will sit and gain hands on experience of the module with instuctor guidance.
Learning using training material
This is also a self paced training where training material is shared with the attendees. This includes material explaining the system and usually followed by step by step screenshots.
Training on the job
i.e. Having the person work as a shadow or apprentice/intern and gets mentored or guided by a senior member on the job. The trainee will face real life scenarios and will use the application to work those.
Make sure you as the training lead or instructor has done a dry run using a sufficient number of people and ironed out all the difficulties and issues present. After all the planning, prepare a proper training schedule, have a concise and clear agenda and propagate it to the attendees as required.
Organizations can benefit by having a well planned training scheduled. Resources who get trained using the methods identified above, not only help themselves by making their jobs easier, faster and error free, inturn they also help improve the organization bottomline who has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in developing the system
So in all to ensure that your project actually hits a homerun after implementation, it is necessary to have a proper training module near the end of the project.
Showing posts with label Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Policy. Show all posts
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
IT Understanding by Business
What is Technology?
The dictionary meaning of Technology is "Applying skills and knowledge towards use of Tools and Techniques to serve a purpose". In the Insurance domain, IT Technology is the use of Computers and its associated tools and techniques so as to solve a business issue or serve a business purpose.
Let's say an organization goes for the latest and greatest Policy and Claims administration system investing millions of dollars to phase out their rigid and inflexible legacy Policy administration application. They have hired tens, if not hundreds of IT workers who must work with business and try to get the job done by understanding the business objectives and painpoints and resolve them by using the IT solutions based on the functionality supported by the product and use of their own years of experience.
IT side of Business and its Advantages
To achieve this and similar objectives, it is very important for business to be aware and be abreast of the IT world, to understand the IT jargon that goes on today. Parallely IT also has to understand the business processes, their jargons and painpoints and try to bridge the gap that exists between the two so as to make the job easier.
But the focus for this post is the Business side understanding of IT - Why do we need it? and how do we culminate it?
There are a lot of technology areas that are closely associated with business and having a fair understanding definitely helps and makes your job easier as a Business analyst. For e.g. in the Insurance world, understanding XMLs for sending data across applications, configuring policy, claims and billing applications for user administration, organizational setup, permissions and access, rating rules configuration etc are all areas that are closely associated to the day to day working of the business folks. Lots of Policy, Claims, CRM applications nowadays have a business rules configuration engine which will allow business users to setup business rules without the intervention of Technical group and will thus save cost and time to rollout. The output will also be of a better quality due to the involvement of business who will ensure all day to day and boundary scenarios are well tested.
Knowledge of IT would definitely give business users a good perspective on how things progress from requirements to design to development to testing before making it to the floors. They would be able to better understand the estimates provided by development, cross question and correct the estimates to more real world numbers.
Sometime business people get intimidated and lost in the technical jargon. So it definitely helps to know the tech talk so both Technical and business folks are on the same page. Business definitely stands to gain if they understand the nuances of the functional and technical features of the application along with knowing the tools of usage just as IT would gain if it understands the day to day business process of the applications they work on.
Business should be and nowadays is getting more and more technology savvy. The Gap between Technology and Business is reducing.faster than an ice cream cone in a hot afternoon. There exists a set of business SMEs who not only understand their busines but also the Technology aspect to an extent, but they may not get the whole picture due to various reasons,
1> Not enough technical inclination
- There is a set of business users who have got so used to their own way of doing things that they do not want to change. For example - Some people are so used to use to the abacus for doing calculations that they do not want to switch over to using the latest calculator. Agreed, Abacus has its advantages, but certainly calculator gives you more features and does it faster and with rapid scalability and flexibility.
For e.g. Calculating Rates and premium in an excel though worked as a solution in the old ages, in the new world we have application features that will do the calculations for you or using a desk calendar for policy premium, insured letter reminders rather than using the latest automatic activity and diary reminders that the applications provide out of the box.
2> Know as you go attitude
- I will learn about it when i get there. Procastination is another reason that many smart and intelligent business people do not use their knowledge in understanding IT which otherwise would serve as a great benefit, not just to that individual but also to the organization as a whole.
3> "Who needs this" attitude
- Mr. know-it-all attitude is another detrimental roadbock that delineates project progress faster than you can imagine.
Why does business need to understand IT?
1> Improve solution efficiency
- To efficiently and colaboratively work on Projects. It is necessary for IT and business to understand each other and make sure information does not get lost in translation. e.g. Business says, "Customer service should have the latest billing and payments information so that they can effectively communicate with customers"
Now business has to know and understand
- If financials are stored in the same "Policy & Claims System" or are retrieved from a different system altogether
- Is a realtime integration possible between the financial system and customer portal
- If not, is a nightly batch an option? How long? when does the process run?
- What information is available in the financial system so the type of information to be retrieved can be designed and developed.
- Last but not the least, design and develop a solution that is technically feasible, scalable, flexible and is intuitive to customers, business and the end operations teams alike.
2> Save costs and improve quality of output
- Business involvement in Technology will save lots of back and forth communications and confusions, unnecessary meetings between IT and business.
This will also improve the final quality of output due to the clear requirements and also final real scenario and boundary testing done by business
3> Functionality
- The more business understands about technology, the easier they will be able to put their ideas across and inturn will be able to develop and suggest solutions that are more closer to the real needs and are also technically feasible.
4> Advance knowldege
- Doing all of the above will not help the project and overall organization, but will also help and develop your individual skillsets and improve and expand your area of knowledge. Thus it will help you be more competitive and assist in reaching your career goals
How to achieve this?
1> Explore and understand Technology and business
- Read articles related to technology and business. Be curious, try and understand the daily happenings in the IT world.
- Explore applications
The applications that you work on, spend sometime to understand the fine points, nuances, the small functional quirks that they provide and try to build on that. This will help you not only understand the application's current capabilities but will also help you improvise on them so you can build a better product.
2> Ask Questions
- Ask questions when something is not clear or does not make sense why it is happening. Find a mentor who has a role similar to yours or is from the IT domain. So he/she can explain and resolve your doubts.
3> Training
- Finally training, nothing beats getting trained on the system that will be your source of "if not bread and butter then Jam and Honey"
- If possible, undergo training where you can learn all about Business analyst responsibilities and profile, What does it take to be a successful BA and a technologist?
4> Organization Culture
- IT understanding of business depends strongly upon on the organization culture, the methodologies that are followed for executing a project. How much intearaction and collboration exists between IT and business departments.
- Organizations should also focus on mentoring business folks and having something like a buddy system in place so business and IT work in an aligned fashion.
Doing all this is definitely beneficial to the organization and will help build a stronger and a knowledgable workforce who will help curb the overall organization costs and help in successful project implementations.
The dictionary meaning of Technology is "Applying skills and knowledge towards use of Tools and Techniques to serve a purpose". In the Insurance domain, IT Technology is the use of Computers and its associated tools and techniques so as to solve a business issue or serve a business purpose.
Let's say an organization goes for the latest and greatest Policy and Claims administration system investing millions of dollars to phase out their rigid and inflexible legacy Policy administration application. They have hired tens, if not hundreds of IT workers who must work with business and try to get the job done by understanding the business objectives and painpoints and resolve them by using the IT solutions based on the functionality supported by the product and use of their own years of experience.
IT side of Business and its Advantages
To achieve this and similar objectives, it is very important for business to be aware and be abreast of the IT world, to understand the IT jargon that goes on today. Parallely IT also has to understand the business processes, their jargons and painpoints and try to bridge the gap that exists between the two so as to make the job easier.
But the focus for this post is the Business side understanding of IT - Why do we need it? and how do we culminate it?
There are a lot of technology areas that are closely associated with business and having a fair understanding definitely helps and makes your job easier as a Business analyst. For e.g. in the Insurance world, understanding XMLs for sending data across applications, configuring policy, claims and billing applications for user administration, organizational setup, permissions and access, rating rules configuration etc are all areas that are closely associated to the day to day working of the business folks. Lots of Policy, Claims, CRM applications nowadays have a business rules configuration engine which will allow business users to setup business rules without the intervention of Technical group and will thus save cost and time to rollout. The output will also be of a better quality due to the involvement of business who will ensure all day to day and boundary scenarios are well tested.
Knowledge of IT would definitely give business users a good perspective on how things progress from requirements to design to development to testing before making it to the floors. They would be able to better understand the estimates provided by development, cross question and correct the estimates to more real world numbers.
Sometime business people get intimidated and lost in the technical jargon. So it definitely helps to know the tech talk so both Technical and business folks are on the same page. Business definitely stands to gain if they understand the nuances of the functional and technical features of the application along with knowing the tools of usage just as IT would gain if it understands the day to day business process of the applications they work on.
Business should be and nowadays is getting more and more technology savvy. The Gap between Technology and Business is reducing.faster than an ice cream cone in a hot afternoon. There exists a set of business SMEs who not only understand their busines but also the Technology aspect to an extent, but they may not get the whole picture due to various reasons,
1> Not enough technical inclination
- There is a set of business users who have got so used to their own way of doing things that they do not want to change. For example - Some people are so used to use to the abacus for doing calculations that they do not want to switch over to using the latest calculator. Agreed, Abacus has its advantages, but certainly calculator gives you more features and does it faster and with rapid scalability and flexibility.
For e.g. Calculating Rates and premium in an excel though worked as a solution in the old ages, in the new world we have application features that will do the calculations for you or using a desk calendar for policy premium, insured letter reminders rather than using the latest automatic activity and diary reminders that the applications provide out of the box.
2> Know as you go attitude
- I will learn about it when i get there. Procastination is another reason that many smart and intelligent business people do not use their knowledge in understanding IT which otherwise would serve as a great benefit, not just to that individual but also to the organization as a whole.
3> "Who needs this" attitude
- Mr. know-it-all attitude is another detrimental roadbock that delineates project progress faster than you can imagine.
Why does business need to understand IT?
1> Improve solution efficiency
- To efficiently and colaboratively work on Projects. It is necessary for IT and business to understand each other and make sure information does not get lost in translation. e.g. Business says, "Customer service should have the latest billing and payments information so that they can effectively communicate with customers"
Now business has to know and understand
- If financials are stored in the same "Policy & Claims System" or are retrieved from a different system altogether
- Is a realtime integration possible between the financial system and customer portal
- If not, is a nightly batch an option? How long? when does the process run?
- What information is available in the financial system so the type of information to be retrieved can be designed and developed.
- Last but not the least, design and develop a solution that is technically feasible, scalable, flexible and is intuitive to customers, business and the end operations teams alike.
2> Save costs and improve quality of output
- Business involvement in Technology will save lots of back and forth communications and confusions, unnecessary meetings between IT and business.
This will also improve the final quality of output due to the clear requirements and also final real scenario and boundary testing done by business
3> Functionality
- The more business understands about technology, the easier they will be able to put their ideas across and inturn will be able to develop and suggest solutions that are more closer to the real needs and are also technically feasible.
4> Advance knowldege
- Doing all of the above will not help the project and overall organization, but will also help and develop your individual skillsets and improve and expand your area of knowledge. Thus it will help you be more competitive and assist in reaching your career goals
How to achieve this?
1> Explore and understand Technology and business
- Read articles related to technology and business. Be curious, try and understand the daily happenings in the IT world.
- Explore applications
The applications that you work on, spend sometime to understand the fine points, nuances, the small functional quirks that they provide and try to build on that. This will help you not only understand the application's current capabilities but will also help you improvise on them so you can build a better product.
2> Ask Questions
- Ask questions when something is not clear or does not make sense why it is happening. Find a mentor who has a role similar to yours or is from the IT domain. So he/she can explain and resolve your doubts.
3> Training
- Finally training, nothing beats getting trained on the system that will be your source of "if not bread and butter then Jam and Honey"
- If possible, undergo training where you can learn all about Business analyst responsibilities and profile, What does it take to be a successful BA and a technologist?
4> Organization Culture
- IT understanding of business depends strongly upon on the organization culture, the methodologies that are followed for executing a project. How much intearaction and collboration exists between IT and business departments.
- Organizations should also focus on mentoring business folks and having something like a buddy system in place so business and IT work in an aligned fashion.
Doing all this is definitely beneficial to the organization and will help build a stronger and a knowledgable workforce who will help curb the overall organization costs and help in successful project implementations.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Clean Data - Policy and Claims Systems
This post is a slight deviation from our usual Project Management topics. Many of the projects that i have been are severely haunted by data issues.
Data is the heart and soul of any business. Everyone needs data that is clean, consistent, reliable and secured. Quality and Utility of data improves as and how we add volumes of proper and relevant information.
Insurance carriers like any other industry are often plagued with bad, inconsistent or non reliable data which may have happened due to various factors like application shortcomings, poor system and/or data model design, End user competence levels, user application knowhow etc.
What exactly is Bad data?
Data which is not normalized, inconsistent and thus non reliable is bad data. To give you a simple example, Same information can be represented in multitude of ways e.g. Contacts information stored in the system can be saved based on individual user's preferences.
e.g. Doctor identifier can be stored in system as "Doctor", "Dr", "Dr.", "Doc" etc. So if we need to run a report on all doctors in Systems or if we need to convert this data, we need some logic to handle care this inconsistency.
This is just one example of a potential data issue. There are multitude of other cases that are party to this bad data issue.
Why do we need good data?
Like we said earlier, an application is a bare body skeleton without data. Data is used for various purposes by insurance organizations for e.g.
- First and foremost Policy, Billing and Claims processing
- Customer service
- Internal Organizational and statistical analysis
- Risk analysis
- Predictive analytics
- Reporting to 3rd party agencies
- State and federal regulatory and compliance reporting
- Sending data across systems to interchange information e.g ISO, DMV etc
Impacts
Impacts of bad quality data are
1> Coverage Denial
Insureds may be incorrectly denied coverage, if policy number, date of loss, cancellation, reinstatement, renewal, coverage etc data is incorrectly entered or not entered when it should (No Mandatory checks in the System)
2> Incorrect Reporting
Incorrect data may cause claims to be incorrectly reported to 3rd party agencies which may lead to potential issues for the insureds and the carrier alike.
3> Claims Leakage
Claims may get incorrectly paid if policy, claims data is incorrect leading to leakage
4> Operational Efficiency
Severely impacts the organizational efficiency of Intake and operations groups e.g Claims System forces Intake to capture claims story as long winded notes rather than structured data. Consequently when Customer service or executive Management when references this claim file has to read through pages of data to get a gist of the claim or even report some status to the customer.
5> Functional Impacts
Data logic errors, poor system designs and incorrectly written business rules can cause problems for eg today's claims and policy systems use address standardizations or postal address lookups based on the address data entered in the system. If there is no uniformity in the city, street, zip entered throughout the system, then good luck with doing a proximity search when looking for a company prefered low cost Auto Bodyshop within 5 miles of your home location.
6> Third Party Impacts
There have been cases where an insured's policy was not recognized by DMV and have caused insured problems when he was stopped during a routine traffic check.
7> Statistical Impacts
Internal actuary and management level executives do a business health check and future policy rate predictions to be competitive based on the Loss ratios, premiums, outstanding payments etc. Sometimes incorrect or poorly designed data structure prevent this. This impacts the organizational data quality and process effectiveness.
8> Conversion Issues
When an old application is retired and data is moved to a new and better system, bad data is the worst possible issue that development and business Team have to tackle. In this case, each scenario has to be correctly identified and workaround have to be reached and agreed in order for the data conversion to proceed.
Handling data Issues
All these and other such problems are surely avoidable or can be solved if steps are taken to resolve the issues identified.
The first and foremost thing that has to happen in this case is proper and effective investment in the area of technology, leverage business knowledge and expertise and finally effective data management to reach the end goal.
Usage of the ACORD Data Model
Many of the companies who go for system transformation or remodeling do so because
- Many who move away from legacy system need to understand the power and importance of good data. For this it is important to have a consistent and a normalized Claims, policy and billing data structure. There is a generic data structure that is proposed by ACORD
It makes more sense to effectively leverage new technology for data interchange, data setup and storage e.g buying a leading top of the market claims system rather than investing in legacy system short term fixes that offer no long term gains, are fairly costly and therefore a bad investment.
Make sure you have your key stakeholders involvement. Their go ahead, business vision and knowhow is extremely important to guarantee success in your project ventures.
Data is the heart and soul of any business. Everyone needs data that is clean, consistent, reliable and secured. Quality and Utility of data improves as and how we add volumes of proper and relevant information.
Insurance carriers like any other industry are often plagued with bad, inconsistent or non reliable data which may have happened due to various factors like application shortcomings, poor system and/or data model design, End user competence levels, user application knowhow etc.
What exactly is Bad data?
Data which is not normalized, inconsistent and thus non reliable is bad data. To give you a simple example, Same information can be represented in multitude of ways e.g. Contacts information stored in the system can be saved based on individual user's preferences.
e.g. Doctor identifier can be stored in system as "Doctor", "Dr", "Dr.", "Doc" etc. So if we need to run a report on all doctors in Systems or if we need to convert this data, we need some logic to handle care this inconsistency.
This is just one example of a potential data issue. There are multitude of other cases that are party to this bad data issue.
Why do we need good data?
Like we said earlier, an application is a bare body skeleton without data. Data is used for various purposes by insurance organizations for e.g.
- First and foremost Policy, Billing and Claims processing
- Customer service
- Internal Organizational and statistical analysis
- Risk analysis
- Predictive analytics
- Reporting to 3rd party agencies
- State and federal regulatory and compliance reporting
- Sending data across systems to interchange information e.g ISO, DMV etc
Impacts
Impacts of bad quality data are
1> Coverage Denial
Insureds may be incorrectly denied coverage, if policy number, date of loss, cancellation, reinstatement, renewal, coverage etc data is incorrectly entered or not entered when it should (No Mandatory checks in the System)
2> Incorrect Reporting
Incorrect data may cause claims to be incorrectly reported to 3rd party agencies which may lead to potential issues for the insureds and the carrier alike.
3> Claims Leakage
Claims may get incorrectly paid if policy, claims data is incorrect leading to leakage
4> Operational Efficiency
Severely impacts the organizational efficiency of Intake and operations groups e.g Claims System forces Intake to capture claims story as long winded notes rather than structured data. Consequently when Customer service or executive Management when references this claim file has to read through pages of data to get a gist of the claim or even report some status to the customer.
5> Functional Impacts
Data logic errors, poor system designs and incorrectly written business rules can cause problems for eg today's claims and policy systems use address standardizations or postal address lookups based on the address data entered in the system. If there is no uniformity in the city, street, zip entered throughout the system, then good luck with doing a proximity search when looking for a company prefered low cost Auto Bodyshop within 5 miles of your home location.
6> Third Party Impacts
There have been cases where an insured's policy was not recognized by DMV and have caused insured problems when he was stopped during a routine traffic check.
7> Statistical Impacts
Internal actuary and management level executives do a business health check and future policy rate predictions to be competitive based on the Loss ratios, premiums, outstanding payments etc. Sometimes incorrect or poorly designed data structure prevent this. This impacts the organizational data quality and process effectiveness.
8> Conversion Issues
When an old application is retired and data is moved to a new and better system, bad data is the worst possible issue that development and business Team have to tackle. In this case, each scenario has to be correctly identified and workaround have to be reached and agreed in order for the data conversion to proceed.
Handling data Issues
All these and other such problems are surely avoidable or can be solved if steps are taken to resolve the issues identified.
The first and foremost thing that has to happen in this case is proper and effective investment in the area of technology, leverage business knowledge and expertise and finally effective data management to reach the end goal.
Usage of the ACORD Data Model
Many of the companies who go for system transformation or remodeling do so because
- Many who move away from legacy system need to understand the power and importance of good data. For this it is important to have a consistent and a normalized Claims, policy and billing data structure. There is a generic data structure that is proposed by ACORD
It makes more sense to effectively leverage new technology for data interchange, data setup and storage e.g buying a leading top of the market claims system rather than investing in legacy system short term fixes that offer no long term gains, are fairly costly and therefore a bad investment.
Make sure you have your key stakeholders involvement. Their go ahead, business vision and knowhow is extremely important to guarantee success in your project ventures.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Project Management - Best Practices
What is the need for Best practices in any line or discipline of work? We can always continue to do things the way we have been doing and not look for ways to excel, simplify and innovate. But do you think this approach will take you far and guarantee long term success...i think not...For this reason we have to follow some best practices in what we do....
Best practices are a step towards project success and away from failures....There are a multitude of reasons why projects may fail. Following are the 5 key areas that are the root cause of any project failure - Customer satisfaction, Project scope, costs, Project resources and Time allocation.
There are certain finer points that differentiate a Good project Manager from...well, a Project Manager. Whether you are a first time Project Manager or someone who lives and breathes projects 24 hours a day, it is always beneficial to be a part of that distinct group.
Again, these are some ideas that i have found useful based on my past experiences. You may have your own set of principles that you can follow. But the bottom line here is, have some underlying guidelines that will succinctly identify you from the other bees in a swarm.
Plan and prepare
They say you should never stop learning. Learning, inquisitiveness, curiosity is what distinguishes a successful person from others.
Before starting out on a project learn what you can about the project. Make sure you have a good enough background on the Company, department and the Project in general. Identify the key stakeholders, their view points and ideas - Hold meetings to do this. Some organizations have a predefined project execution and management methodology they want you to follow. In some cases, you have the flexibility to decide on what methodology suits best.
All this will not only help you in managing your Project, but will also help develop more confidence.
Just the right documentation
As you progress, you will find that all projects are not created equal. There may be some projects, organizations where it makes sense and is probably the organization culture to have truck loads of documentation which ultimately no one reads or if someone needs some information, rather than sifting through the whole lot of information and wasting time, is better off asking someone who already worked on this project or perhaps pave his/her own way.
Other projects may prefer less documentation due to reasons like - Project relevance, Management methodology, project scope, timelines etc
So identify the documentation needs based on your project and follow them as the case may be.
Communication
Communication is the key for project execution. A Project Manager who is a hands on person and does not focus on Communication is surely destined for failure. You definitely have to hone, sharpen and continuously develop your communication skills. Have all channels of communication open - Phone, email, face-to-face. Communicate top down, bottom up, sideways when on a project.
Importantly focus on your "soft skills", this is the area which which has the potential to build or break your career as a Project Manager.
- Have a pre determined and defined communication protocol set and make sure you follow it.
- Have regular meetings with stakeholders and all other parties involved in the project.
- Have regular Team meetings to get as much feedback from them as possible. Understand their concerns, bottlenecks, help to remove any obstacles in their path.
- Discuss one on one with customers on a regular basis to gauge their satisfaction level. Is there anything you think we can do better? Is there something that you feel needs to be changed? Do you have confidence in our delivery approach etc?
- Have one on one meetings with your executives, understand their concerns and perpectives on project progress and delivery on a regular basis.
- Reporting more to senior management is better than reporting less.
Regular updating your project plans, risk and issues plan
A good project manager never shies away from risk and issue management. It is an ongoing activity throughout the life of the project. Keep your eyes and ears open for risks associated to your project cost, schedule, scope, resources and quality.
Work on and assign your day to day issues to your team members, track and manage the status by frequent reporting. Work with the Team to help them resolve the issues. Update your risk, communication and project plan on a regular basis.
These are just some of the obvious things that are important in managing a project. Following these will make you more confident in leading and executing your project. All this does not guarantee a project's success but will atleast give you enough confidence that you have covered your bases.
I am sure you must be having a lot more tricks up your sleeve based on your own experiences that ensure your project successes.
Best practices are a step towards project success and away from failures....There are a multitude of reasons why projects may fail. Following are the 5 key areas that are the root cause of any project failure - Customer satisfaction, Project scope, costs, Project resources and Time allocation.
There are certain finer points that differentiate a Good project Manager from...well, a Project Manager. Whether you are a first time Project Manager or someone who lives and breathes projects 24 hours a day, it is always beneficial to be a part of that distinct group.
Again, these are some ideas that i have found useful based on my past experiences. You may have your own set of principles that you can follow. But the bottom line here is, have some underlying guidelines that will succinctly identify you from the other bees in a swarm.
Plan and prepare
They say you should never stop learning. Learning, inquisitiveness, curiosity is what distinguishes a successful person from others.
Before starting out on a project learn what you can about the project. Make sure you have a good enough background on the Company, department and the Project in general. Identify the key stakeholders, their view points and ideas - Hold meetings to do this. Some organizations have a predefined project execution and management methodology they want you to follow. In some cases, you have the flexibility to decide on what methodology suits best.
All this will not only help you in managing your Project, but will also help develop more confidence.
Just the right documentation
As you progress, you will find that all projects are not created equal. There may be some projects, organizations where it makes sense and is probably the organization culture to have truck loads of documentation which ultimately no one reads or if someone needs some information, rather than sifting through the whole lot of information and wasting time, is better off asking someone who already worked on this project or perhaps pave his/her own way.
Other projects may prefer less documentation due to reasons like - Project relevance, Management methodology, project scope, timelines etc
So identify the documentation needs based on your project and follow them as the case may be.
Communication
Communication is the key for project execution. A Project Manager who is a hands on person and does not focus on Communication is surely destined for failure. You definitely have to hone, sharpen and continuously develop your communication skills. Have all channels of communication open - Phone, email, face-to-face. Communicate top down, bottom up, sideways when on a project.
Importantly focus on your "soft skills", this is the area which which has the potential to build or break your career as a Project Manager.
- Have a pre determined and defined communication protocol set and make sure you follow it.
- Have regular meetings with stakeholders and all other parties involved in the project.
- Have regular Team meetings to get as much feedback from them as possible. Understand their concerns, bottlenecks, help to remove any obstacles in their path.
- Discuss one on one with customers on a regular basis to gauge their satisfaction level. Is there anything you think we can do better? Is there something that you feel needs to be changed? Do you have confidence in our delivery approach etc?
- Have one on one meetings with your executives, understand their concerns and perpectives on project progress and delivery on a regular basis.
- Reporting more to senior management is better than reporting less.
Regular updating your project plans, risk and issues plan
A good project manager never shies away from risk and issue management. It is an ongoing activity throughout the life of the project. Keep your eyes and ears open for risks associated to your project cost, schedule, scope, resources and quality.
Work on and assign your day to day issues to your team members, track and manage the status by frequent reporting. Work with the Team to help them resolve the issues. Update your risk, communication and project plan on a regular basis.
These are just some of the obvious things that are important in managing a project. Following these will make you more confident in leading and executing your project. All this does not guarantee a project's success but will atleast give you enough confidence that you have covered your bases.
I am sure you must be having a lot more tricks up your sleeve based on your own experiences that ensure your project successes.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Insurance and IT Projects
I have been associated with the Insurance domain for over 12 years now and all my projects management related articles are based on my insurance projects background. This article tries to understand the relationships that exist between Insurance and IT and how to successfully execute IT Projects in the Insurance industry.
Insurance Industry Project Management relationship:
Insurance companies have a need for IT project implementations mainly based on their business requirements wrt speed to market a product, to align the organizational, cross divisional efficiencies, to reduce costs, to optimize processes across organization etc.
Insurance industry has a vast paramount level of experience wrt the business knowhow, but when it comes to the project management, there is required a specific skillset that will get the job done right, the first time.
Business need:
To execute projects in Insurance domains, the first and foremost thing that has to happen is to understand the business value expectations by clearly articulating and understanding the business requirements. Once this is defined, it is necessary to understand the current state and future state of the business processes so that it will help to optimize or leverage the technology solutions that can make the transformation possible.
Once the Technology solution is defined on paper atleast in a draft version, it is necessary to develop a high level roadmap taking all the stakeholders and project sponsers in confidence and develop a high level implementation plan. This takes into account and aligns the Program/Project level goals wrt Scope, time, cost, quality and resources.
Project Types:
Insurance projects vary from small size and budget to mid size - product implementations to enterprise level transformation Initiatives. Depending on the project types, the application and business needs, the project management processes and methods are decided.
The most common project categories of Insurance IT Projects are,
- IT System or enterprise level system consolidations
- Insurance Product implementations
- Application development, maintenance and Outsourcing
- Systems integration
- Pure IT Outsourcing
Methodology:
Projects in Insurance IT can follow any and all methodologies of execution. This entirely depends on the organization culture, project size, type, budget etc.
Traditionally Projects have been following the waterfall methodologies and in the new age either lean towads the RUP or Agile execution methodologies or a mixture of the two.
Project Manager Success criteria:
For a Project Manager to be successful in the Insurance IT Domain, he has to have Insurance business processes, operational knowledge along with Technical knowhow and skills
To elaborate,
Business Process knowledge
Understand the insurance domain industry, atleast the functional area with which the project is associated - either policy, billing or claims
Understand the various roles played by the stakeholders, SMEs and end users like Customer service (CSR), Intake, Accounting, Underwriting, Billing and collections, Operations, Sales, Marketing etc
PMO:
Successful Execution of Projects in the Insurance domain industry is based first and foremost on laying proper groundwork in terms of having a proper Project Governance plan or setting up a formal Project Management Office (PMO). PMO based on the project scope will divide or structure the project by LOBs based on business efficiencies to be achieved.
Another point to note is that since Insurance is a highly competive industry, driven by business needs, project Management exposure even if it exists will be in cross functional areas or even in deep departmental silos. So what this means is, the PMO has to first allocate and then align the Organization resources towards the common objective set and goals. For successful execution, the PMO should have a common and consistent approach in executing the projects. only this will ensure a common platform and lay the basis of future project success.
PMO functional areas:
PMO in Insurance IT will have to deal with Vendor management, project planning, budgeting and structuring, project communication and risk management planning.
PMO has to keep in focus the enterprise level impacts of the project being executed, be cognizant of the project management and execution costs wrt scheduling and planning tools, development and status tracking tools, configuration, testing and issue resolution tools.
The roles of the executing body have to be well defined as a part of the planning process.The Team has to be made aware of the various phases of project management, the dependent roles and parties involved e.g. requirements, development, infrastructure, testing, QA etc
Scope creep and cost overruns need to be managed very carefully to ensure project success
Insurance Industry Project Management relationship:
Insurance companies have a need for IT project implementations mainly based on their business requirements wrt speed to market a product, to align the organizational, cross divisional efficiencies, to reduce costs, to optimize processes across organization etc.
Insurance industry has a vast paramount level of experience wrt the business knowhow, but when it comes to the project management, there is required a specific skillset that will get the job done right, the first time.
Business need:
To execute projects in Insurance domains, the first and foremost thing that has to happen is to understand the business value expectations by clearly articulating and understanding the business requirements. Once this is defined, it is necessary to understand the current state and future state of the business processes so that it will help to optimize or leverage the technology solutions that can make the transformation possible.
Once the Technology solution is defined on paper atleast in a draft version, it is necessary to develop a high level roadmap taking all the stakeholders and project sponsers in confidence and develop a high level implementation plan. This takes into account and aligns the Program/Project level goals wrt Scope, time, cost, quality and resources.
Project Types:
Insurance projects vary from small size and budget to mid size - product implementations to enterprise level transformation Initiatives. Depending on the project types, the application and business needs, the project management processes and methods are decided.
The most common project categories of Insurance IT Projects are,
- IT System or enterprise level system consolidations
- Insurance Product implementations
- Application development, maintenance and Outsourcing
- Systems integration
- Pure IT Outsourcing
Methodology:
Projects in Insurance IT can follow any and all methodologies of execution. This entirely depends on the organization culture, project size, type, budget etc.
Traditionally Projects have been following the waterfall methodologies and in the new age either lean towads the RUP or Agile execution methodologies or a mixture of the two.
Project Manager Success criteria:
For a Project Manager to be successful in the Insurance IT Domain, he has to have Insurance business processes, operational knowledge along with Technical knowhow and skills
To elaborate,
Business Process knowledge
Understand the insurance domain industry, atleast the functional area with which the project is associated - either policy, billing or claims
Understand the various roles played by the stakeholders, SMEs and end users like Customer service (CSR), Intake, Accounting, Underwriting, Billing and collections, Operations, Sales, Marketing etc
PMO:
Successful Execution of Projects in the Insurance domain industry is based first and foremost on laying proper groundwork in terms of having a proper Project Governance plan or setting up a formal Project Management Office (PMO). PMO based on the project scope will divide or structure the project by LOBs based on business efficiencies to be achieved.
Another point to note is that since Insurance is a highly competive industry, driven by business needs, project Management exposure even if it exists will be in cross functional areas or even in deep departmental silos. So what this means is, the PMO has to first allocate and then align the Organization resources towards the common objective set and goals. For successful execution, the PMO should have a common and consistent approach in executing the projects. only this will ensure a common platform and lay the basis of future project success.
PMO functional areas:
PMO in Insurance IT will have to deal with Vendor management, project planning, budgeting and structuring, project communication and risk management planning.
PMO has to keep in focus the enterprise level impacts of the project being executed, be cognizant of the project management and execution costs wrt scheduling and planning tools, development and status tracking tools, configuration, testing and issue resolution tools.
The roles of the executing body have to be well defined as a part of the planning process.The Team has to be made aware of the various phases of project management, the dependent roles and parties involved e.g. requirements, development, infrastructure, testing, QA etc
Scope creep and cost overruns need to be managed very carefully to ensure project success
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