CareFirst saves millions of dollars by improving resource allocation with CA Clarity PPM

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1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY CareFirst saves millions of dollars by improving resource allocation with CA Clarity PPM CUSTOMER PROFILE Industry: Healthcare Company: CareFirst Employees: 5,000 Revenue: $6.8 billion (FY 2009) BUSINESS CareFirst provides health insurance in the US Mid-Atlantic region for more than three million members. The not-forprofit organization has 5,000 employees. CHALLENGE To address healthcare sector changes, CareFirst has embarked on a number of major IT investments. To safeguard the success of these initiatives, it needed an innovative approach to enhance resource, project and portfolio management. SOLUTION CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) enables CareFirst to track 150 plus projects worth more than $100 million. The solution facilitates greater transparency, communication and accountability. BENEFIT CareFirst has been able to save millions of dollars by optimizing its resources and improving project success rates. As a result, it is a better position to respond with innovative approaches to cope with healthcare changes. agility made possible

2 Business Providing not-for-profit health insurance to 3 million people CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield (CareFirst) is a not-for-profit organization responsible for providing health insurance in Maryland, the District of Colombia and Northern Virginia. The organization is the largest healthcare insurer in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, with three million members and 5,000 employees based across 10 corporate sites, including Baltimore and Washington DC. CareFirst also serves more than 550,000 members of the Federal Employees Health Program. CareFirst also operates a profitable regional HMO subsidiary CareFirst BlueChoice that features more than 5,000 primary care physicians. Challenge Responding to change in the healthcare sector Major healthcare reform, a growing demand for new services and rising operational costs are just some of the factors contributing to a climate of change within the US healthcare sector. In order to respond to this evolving landscape, CareFirst had a schedule of planned investments over the next few years. Karen Beaudouin, Program Manager, Project Management Office (PMO) at CareFirst, comments, We developed a program that would eradicate obsolete IT systems and labor-intensive manual processes to drive efficiencies and enable greater business agility. Many projects were running beyond schedule and over budget. Karen Beaudouin Program Manager, Project Management Office (PMO) at CareFirst This had resulted in a host of new IT projects that depended on managing an innovation lifecycle across multiple projects. To ensure these initiatives are delivered successfully and align with its overall business strategy, CareFirst needed to enhance its approach to project management. 02

3 Beaudouin, comments, Our project and portfolio managers were using a myriad of methodologies and solutions in different business areas to manage projects. Portfolio, project and resource information was spread across numerous applications. In particular, there was no single consolidated list of contracted resources. This lack of consistency and centralized information resulted in poor project visibility and complex reporting. Many projects were running beyond schedule and over budget. But without good communication and reporting, it was difficult to identify the problems and when bottlenecks needed addressing, adds Beaudouin. When a new CEO started at CareFirst, a fresh strategy for project and portfolio management was established, which was founded on providing greater transparency, cost-awareness and accountability. To achieve these goals, CareFirst s project management office (PMO) and IT department joined forces to develop and implement standardized best practice IT project management processes. To support this framework, they needed a single centralized project and portfolio management solution. Solution Consolidated management of more than $100 million in project investments CareFirst selected CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) to help it address its project management issues. Beaudouin comments, The key factors in our selection of CA Clarity PPM were its user-friendly interface, ability to track inter-dependencies between projects and integration with Microsoft Project. To accelerate the go-live date for CA Clarity PPM, CareFirst initially had two separate implementations of the solution. The first CA Clarity PPM instance was hosted by specialist IT partner Assyst, and enabled CareFirst to cleanse and configure its existing project data, while concurrently building and configuring a permanent deployment onsite. In addition to CareFirst s intensive training program, CA Education provided training for CareFirst s key project staff via technical and functional boot-camps and Web-based training tools. More than 250 projects are now tracked with CA Clarity PPM, which vary from day-to-day IT maintenance projects to major corporate IT initiatives with budgets of more than $100 million. CareFirst has 2,000 employees and contractors using the solution on a daily basis for time entry, with the solution integrating directly with the organization s payroll system. Beaudouin comments, CA Clarity PPM is configured to send automated escalations to managers if their staff fails to log their time, which has resulted in 97 percent compliance with our time entry policies. This is a massive improvement on previous figures, and means we can process time entry statistics within a week rather than a month. Standard naming and role identification policies for each of these users also simplifies resource and demand management. For the first time, we now have comprehensive visibility of all our permanent 03

4 and contracted resources, complete with their skill sets and experience, comments Beaudouin. This means we can share resources more effectively across the organization and project portfolio and ensure we assign skilled staff and contractors to priority initiatives. The financial management of projects is also improved using CA Clarity PPM. With costs assigned to resources, the solution can track actual expenditure versus budgets and automates the production of a weekly report for the CEO outlining the current value of corporate initiatives, as well as project performance metrics. 110 million dollars of project investments managed via CA Clarity PPM CA Clarity PPM s integration with Microsoft Project provides straightforward scheduling processes. As Beaudouin explains, As the majority of our contracted project managers are familiar with Microsoft Project, integrating CA Clarity PPM with the solution makes it much easier to source the information we need and encourage best practices. Benefit Millions of dollars in savings from more productive resources As a result of enhanced transparency, accountability and communication between IT project teams and business stakeholders, CareFirst can identify and resolve issues faster to improve project success rates. Beaudouin comments, CA Clarity PPM has enabled us to restructure project and portfolio management to better support business transformation, our strategic goals and our employees. 04

5 As well as improving efficiency and collaboration, CA Clarity PPM has also massively reduced resourcing costs. Using CA Clarity PPM, we were able to identify that many of our contractors had only a small percentage of their time allocated. By eliminating roles that were not actually necessary for the business we have been able to make cost savings of millions of dollars, adds Beaudouin. The CA Technologies solution has also helped CareFirst to: Enhance IT governance Prioritize resources and capital to better meet strategic goals Deliver more projects on time, to budget and with high quality outcomes. Beaudouin comments, We are now in a stronger position to address the current challenges in the healthcare sector, and can achieve greater agility through transformation. By eliminating roles that were not necessary, we have been able to make savings of millions of dollars. Karen Beaudouin Program Manager, Project Management Office (PMO) at CareFirst Copyright 2011 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker s experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of environments, which may include production and nonproduction environments. Past performance of the software products in such environments is not necessarily indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. CA does not provide legal advice. Neither this document nor any software product referenced herein serves as a substitute for your compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statute, regulation, rule, directive, standard, policy, administrative order, executive order, and so on (collectively, Laws )) referenced herein or any contract obligations with any third parties. You should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any such Laws or contract obligations. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. 05