Strategy

Partnering Through Transformation

Our Client

Our client is a 3,000-employee state agency responsible for protecting the safety, health, and security of its workers and residents.

Transformation Challenge

Our client was searching for a way to profoundly change the way they engage with, and support, their customers. In short, their legacy ecosystem was not seamlessly integrated, so their users needed to remember multiple sets of credentials, their website was difficult to navigate, and data had to be re-entered across systems. On top of that, it was difficult to find developers who understood the computer language used to originally write the workers’ compensation business system over 40 years ago. Our client determined they would embark on a business transformation focused on modernizing the department’s legacy business systems, including their 40-year-old workers’ compensation system and website, as well as improving data management to drive better decisions.

Recognizing the complexity of this business transformation, the client partnered with several different firms to help them with the various pieces, but they also wanted an overall strategic partner to ensure they focused on the right priorities. Our client asked us to help solidify their strategic plan, align their leadership team, and ensure initiatives were coordinated across other consulting firms. They also asked us to help them develop a strong business case for modernizing their workers’ compensation system, which needed to be presented to the state legislature within 18 months.

Our Approach

With an engagement of this scope, alignment is critical, so we worked closely with the client to design a series of workshops to bring together their 11-member executive team and to identify any potential gaps across their five core projects. Concurrently, we helped develop an integrated project schedule and identified interproject dependencies that impacted the projects other consulting firms and sister agencies were leading. These efforts led to the rescoping and realigning of several projects and deliverables, which ultimately led to a better integrated and more cohesive business case.

We also identified a critical need for their supporting project teams to have the right talent, skills, and capabilities for the organization to successfully support the transformation. We developed and executed on a set of recommendations to reorganize portions of the IT division, improve delivery processes, and build additional skill sets to ensure our client would have the requisite talent to accomplish this transformation. Simultaneously, we collaborated with leaders from insurance services, IT, communications, government affairs, web, and communications to design their procurement strategy for the new workers’ compensation system.

As part of the last phase of work, we designed the overall governance structures for each key project in the next phase of the transformation and drafted the business cases that would guide the projects over the next seven years.

Results

Our client was able to socialize the business case with key stakeholders prior to presenting it to the full legislature, enabling them to get ahead of potential questions and gain early support. Ultimately, the seven-year, $320M project was approved. Today, the agency has selected its integration partner and is about to begin its solicitation for vendor proposals for the key system replacement.