DIGITAL HEALTHCARE ON TRACK

Aligning, empowering, measuring and succeeding in software development.

The Challenge

A healthcare accounting software project, that was to become the market leader in it’s industry segment, was spiraling out of control. Originally estimated as a two year development effort, was already a year behind schedule with no evidence that the existing estimates had any reliability..

It’s a classic software story whereas the longer the project had run, the farther from completion it got. As the project delivery date was repeatedly extended, the total cost of the project continued to skyrocket. The business needed help with the goals, roadmap, people and processes. No small task.

The goal, bring the a healthcare provider accounting software Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to completion and release a tested, stable version market asap.

The Solution

The Strategy: Accomplish the MVP by . . .

1. Leveraging the Organization Ontology
2. Crashing the critical path
3. Unleashing qualified resources

We initiated “O2”, a unique combination of scalable industry best practices; Organizational Ontology, defining organizational practices, and Software Engineerings Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM) defining the development processes.

The first step, a management plan for the organization consisting of the roles, responsibilities and authority allocated to each of the individuals who make up the project team. Authority is mission critical as it allows individuals to complete their work.

Second, the production and implementation of a resource loaded timeline of sequenced engineering deliverables. (Aka, and achievable Roadmap to success.)

Finally, performance metrics against the strategies were defined. The reporting system was consequently used to drive decision making at a management level.

The Result

The results are the financials. The implementation cut almost two calendar years off the estimated project duration and despite increasing the staff count by a factor of more than three, a recent estimate of actual costs to the completion date are $13.2 million for a total savings of $2.9 million in direct labor costs.

But by far the most significant cost savings was associated with lost opportunity. This number is somewhat more difficult to estimate. The approach taken here is that a delay in the delivery of the system leads to a delay in the sale of the product and the lost earnings that compound throughout the life span of the business plan. The opportunity cost associated with the original start date and and estimated earnings of 12% of gross revenue is in the neighborhood of $30 million in earnings on $250 million in lost sales.

Overall, the success of the project was “textbook”. Ultimately the result was a total change in organizational culture with an outstanding improvement in engineering productivity. It is seldom that the software industry has such an overwhelming success turning around failing leadership projects.