PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Command Center

The level at which a company handles its processes is a startingpoint in introducing a project management office and related toolsinto the business-IT environment.

Senior management at Amerisure Mutual Insurance places anemphasis on rigor and more repeatable processes in tacklingprojects throughout the company. To reach those goals, a projectmanagement office was established to bring discipline within the ITand business sides of the Michigan-based carrier and has enabled itto begin tackling some major projects.

Once the PMO was established, Amerisure went searching for atool. “The challenge for the PMO was to align closely our businessfolks–our customers–and IT,” says Ed Cullari, director of thecarrier's project management office. “We want to align the ITinitiatives to the business initiatives strategically. We want themto be partners rather than just customers. The PMO was only onelayer. We wanted to have discipline, consistency, and some rigor[for projects] and then automate [the process] to make it easier todo broader reporting across our workload.”

The need for a PMO was created by the proposed improvements tothe carrier's policy administration system. “It's an applicationrestructure,” Cullari says of the project. “What we are doing istaking the legacy systems and reengineering them. That's the topproject inside my workload.”

Amerisure began with eight BPO vendors. Through variouscontacts, Cullari was able to cut that list in half. “I createdmatrices of functionality we were looking for as a company and sentthat out to the vendors,” he says. “They then replied if theirproduct could do what we asked them. I wanted to get their feedbackfirst. We then asked those vendors to come in and do ademonstration.”

Another step involved studying the core competency and thematurity level of Amerisure itself. “Based on the CapabilityMaturity Model level, where are we as a company?” Cullari asks. “Wehave a bunch of processes, and they're not the same processesfollowed throughout the company. I knew that would affect[Amerisure] if we got a tool that was very rigid. It would tie usup. We wouldn't get any work done.”

Cost was an important factor, too. “It makes no sense to bringin a multi-million-dollar tool to do project management,” Cullaricomments. “It's not building anything. You have to be careful aboutwhat you spend.” He believes this is a realistic approach tofinding the right tool. “If you can come in on the low side ofspending, especially in conjunction with your maturity model, andif you tailor [the tool] and it has the ability to grow as yourmaturity level grows, that's the best you can do,” he asserts.

eProject got the job and has allowed business and IT to partnersuccessfully. “We collaborate openly,” says Cullari. “We havevirtual meetings with contractors that work from other parts of thecountry because it's a Web-based tool. They share the same issuelog, the same issue reporting, and the schedule is open foreveryone to see, with controls. Gone are the days when on a Fridayafternoon I'm creating a status report I have to mail out to agazillion people.”

Having everyone use eProject as a single repository was aninitial challenge, Cullari reports. “Rather than puttinginformation on an issue log, they still would send the issues orsolutions via e-mail,” he says. The project managers had toconvince users to put all that information on the system ratherthan relying on e-mail. “If you haven't had a tool and you've beenusing an environment everyone's been using for a number of years,it's hard to switch,” he notes. “It's a total change ofculture.”

While the project management office doesn't build systems orsoftware, it has built discipline within the carrier. And thatdiscipline is carrying beyond the IT department to any projects thecompany may be working on. “There is repeatable process all thetime; people just don't think along those lines. They always thinkof project management as IT,” Cullari points out. “If I can createa template of what we do to renovate an office and the next time werenovate an office we use 85 percent of [the template], that's asavings. We bought the tool. We might as well use it.”