In September 2010, CHEMICS Insurance advised its staff that their all their offices would receive an overhaul of systems and processes. This was a technology overhaul program at its core. Yet there was an opportunity to streamline the business process to enable straight through processing and improve support levels. The new procedures and tools will promise to solve a variety of issues with have plagued the organization. The new tools would be simpler to use to conduct business, easier to train, and easier to support for the IT department. The project was scoped and estimated to be impacting 20,000 employees in the US division before it was deployed to the company’s international offices. Code named “The CHEMICS Method”, the project had a life time budget of $50M from start to completion and it was estimated that the program would take 3 full years to complete.

The senior executive group envisioned some of the clear benefits of the project before signing off on the expenditure. A senior project management team was assembled comprising of internal CHEMICS resources and external consultants. The project would impact nearly every facet of the organizations, including HR, Pre-sales, and External Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Claims, IT, Billing and other Back office. Every business process would be changed and streamlined as part of the project. Sophisticated, role-based workflow systems would be deployed to enter, collect, collate, and analyze business data. Real-time client information would be available and seamlessly integrated throughout the different departments.

The promise was to reduce business costs and streamline the company’s operations which had not been done in any holistic manner for the past 150 years of the company’s existence. The project was kicked off in January of 2011 with each stakeholder signing off prior to launch. The company was committed and a risk management plan was put together along with other project planning deliverables including a program plan, process documentation, project information portals, and a document management system to help manage the project and the related documentation that was being developed.

One year later, senior management started to sense that adequate progress was not being made. Project management reports were being circulated and all indicators were seemingly positive. However, material progress had not been made given the following observations by senior management:

• There were no new systems components being built and tested

• Process documents were produced but not signed off by the concerned stakeholders of impacted departments

• Low staff confidence levels were observed regarding The CHEMICS Method project given conversations being had “around the water cooler”.

• $10M dollars of the program budget were being spent

• Many issues and risks were being reported by various departments, yet not acknowledged by the project management related deliverables

• Significant process and technology rework was being performed without material finalization

• One third of the entire project timeline had already been expended to date.

• Three consulting vendors were changed by the program management team over the course of the one year.

• Without hesitation, senior management concluded that the program was in serious trouble.

Questions

Senior management has chosen to hire you as an expert project management consulted, not otherwise connected with the program thus far, to conduct an assessment.

How would you set about conducting such a review?

How would you structure your report, i.e. on what basis?

Clearly, your report concludes that there is a risk management issue for this program. How would you recommend addressing this issue? What could a comprehensive risk management plan look like and how would you include it in the overall program plan going forward?

Would the assignment of a CHEMICS project manager have made a difference?

If so, in what way, and what specific skills would that manager have required?

What are the lessons learned?