Command Center

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Command Center

The level at which a company handles its processes is a starting point in introducing a project management office and related tools into the business-IT environment.

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

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

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

Amerisure began with eight BPO vendors. Through various contacts, Cullari was able to cut that list in half. “I created matrices of functionality we were looking for as a company and sent that out to the vendors,” he says. “They then replied if their product could do what we asked them. I wanted to get their feedback first. We then asked those vendors to come in and do a demonstration.”

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

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

eProject got the job and has allowed business and IT to partner successfully. “We collaborate openly,” says Cullari. “We have virtual meetings with contractors that work from other parts of the country because it's a Web-based tool. They share the same issue log, the same issue reporting, and the schedule is open for everyone to see, with controls. Gone are the days when on a Friday afternoon I'm creating a status report I have to mail out to a gazillion people.”

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

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