Client Situation
A large healthcare company consolidated seven home grown, disparate core transaction systems into one unified vendor developed platform. When the customer migration was 30 percent complete, the project team turned over the daily operations to the production team to run the system and finish the migration. As the customer migration progressed, system performance declined until it reached a point of multiple daily customer-facing outages and finally an outage that stopped all processing for over a week.
Solution
Initially the company VP for IT Security, now a E78 partner, focused on restoring service and eliminating customer impacts. It required a multi-pronged approach engaging hardware and software vendors along with the company’s IT team to make incremental changes to get back online. Once the system was back online, the attention shifted to stabilizing the system, completing the customer migration, and building trust with the key stakeholders.
The VP formed a cross functional technical team including key representatives from all system functions and vendors. Next, she met with key business stakeholders and collaboratively defined system performance objectives. A business oversight committee was formed to regularly report progress and gain feedback. A prioritized roadmap was developed targeting over 30 key system performance improvement points. Simultaneously, operational processes were updated, and actionable metrics were created to measure system performance through multiple daily processing points.
Results
After several months of a dedicated team executing the plan, system performance improved and the remainder of customers on the legacy system migrated to the new platform. Daily customer impacting events were eliminated and stakeholder trust in the system returned. Results included:
- A threefold increase in processing throughput, reducing the time in half from processing to payment.
- Elimination of daily backlog processing, freeing up the technology team for project work to deliver new business capabilities.
- Stable core platform to integrate new market facing services ahead of their top competitor.
- Predictable system performance to support the company in achieving market leading customer experience levels.
- Early warning metrics to prevent service impacting issues and a shift of the technical teams to focus on the business impact of changes and incidents.
