Share the Load

"Best-practice carriers find a way to keep that pendulum in the middle," he indicates. "It is a balancing act, because the needs of the business should dictate the project prioritization, but you can't do that effectively without understanding the technological implications of those projects."

Before a company can begin adopting any best practice in shared project management, it must address cultural challenges and organizational politics that make people inclined to shun team building. On one hand, IT sometimes has worked to preserve the mystical atmosphere of complexity surrounding technology to keep business at arm's length. And on the other, many times business has been content to keep its distance from project nitty-gritty so it had someone to blame when things went wrong.

"The biggest problem is the finger pointing," Weber maintains. "When a project isn't delivered on time and on budget, or when it doesn't deliver business value, it usually degenerates into the blame game, which doesn't help anyone and makes for a poor quality of life for people on the project."

Breaking down these barriers starts at the top. According to the Center for Business Practices (CBP), the research and publications arm of consultancy PM Solutions, no factor is more critical to team building in project management than senior management support. "Organizational culture often is a reflection of the priorities that are expressed by executives, either verbally or in policy form," says CBP director James S. Pennypacker. (For more, click on "Best Practices That Set High Performers Apart," under Associated Images.)

Once an insurer has committed itself organizationally to the value of team-based project management–whether it views this as optimizing alignment or actually sharing management responsibilities–there are five key strategies it should use to increase the chance of success.

1. Look for leaders in new places.

It's only natural companies would look to put a person with an IT background in charge of an IT project. But that approach limits your pool of potential managers and may not lead you to the best person for the job.

"Senior project sponsors need to be creative in how they look at people and seek out [people with] the right type of management skills for a project, no matter where those people sit within the organization," Weber advises.

He illustrates this with an example of how a company might manage a business process management project. "That requires a manager who has a particular combination of competencies," explains Weber. "The manager needs to be a workflow architect, understand the software, and not be afraid to use it and test it. But this person also needs to understand customer and distributor relationships and other subtleties from the business side. And finally, this manager needs to identify subject matter experts to build a team that collectively has that combination of skills, as well."

In addition to assisting a company in finding the best people for the job, this strategy can enable breaking down organizational barriers to team building by showing both business and IT are valued equally when it comes to project management. Seeing that those opportunities are available and rewarded helps capable leaders come forward on their own accord rather than wait to be found.

At ACUITY, project managers often do come from IT, but that background is not required. In fact, when Laura Conklin, ACUITY's vice president of business consulting, describes the ideal project management candidate, technical knowledge doesn't even make the list. "Our top priority is to find someone who is a good communicator; someone who can be a driver and a visionary, think analytically, and be an agent for change that aligns with our business strategy," she says.

In ACUITY's business consulting department, which serves as the carrier's enterprise project management office, Conklin has staff with IT degrees and programming experience, former business line staff with no IT background, and everything in between. As one example, Conklin points to a project manager who has been overseeing one of ACUITY's key system projects, ACUITY ASIST, which integrates ACUITY's Internet rating and underwriting systems with a document production system to deliver PDF-based policies to its agents within minutes of application. While he today is an IT director, the individual started at ACUITY as a services manager and came to business consulting as a business analyst.

Additionally, on any particular project, the company may tap individuals from outside the department as project managers. "The lines across the [business and IT] areas are very blurred here, and that's exactly what we want," Conklin states.

At Penn National, although project managers tend to come from IT, those managers have a strong grasp of the business of the company, with many having spent a fair amount of time on the business side, according to Bill Jenkins, the company's CIO. "A good manager needs to be good at dealing with people and needs to speak the language of business," he says.

Companies take different approaches to finding staff with project management acumen. They may have a formal evaluation that includes administering programming tests to business staff interested in project management. "Those tests don't necessarily look for specific skills such as COBOL programming. They involve being able to think conceptually and represent business processes logically," Weber says.

Or the approach may be informal. ACUITY's decisions generally come down to one-on-one interviewing. This type of approach is the most common among companies, comments Bernard Tubiana, principal in the New York office of Deloitte Consulting LLP. "[Insurers] don't formally inventory their resource skills or keep those inventories up-to-date. It's based more on [an individ-ual's] reputation."

2. Build a support structure.

The top-level support needed to tear down institutionalized barriers that inhibit teamwork must be followed by building up an organizational structure that facilitates it. This includes some areas–communicating effectively, giving team members meaningful input into the project, and providing tools for collaboration and management–that can be classified as "project management 101." It also means supplying team members the tools to be effective.

"The tools have stayed essentially unchanged for the past five years–Lotus Notes databases, heavy use of Microsoft Project, all the standard tools to enable communication and collaboration. What has changed is the recognition of the discipline around that collaboration, such as CMMI [capability maturity model integration] and other process models that have put it into a framework and added rigor to what [insurers] have been doing," Weber contends.

Because working toward a higher CMMI level requires a company to develop standardized methods, it also helps to "demystify" the project management process. This in turn makes staff–particularly those in non-IT areas–more willing to become involved in a project or take on project management responsibility.

Like many insurers, American National Insurance Company (ANICO) has been working toward progressively higher CMMI levels as a matter of best practice in its IT governance. But for team building, an important feature that has resulted from the carrier's efforts has been a set of artifact templates, available on ANICO's intranet, that reflect the company's development process and project management methodology.

"The biggest impact of our overall governance program is we removed the mystique of what it takes to be successful as a project manager," says Gary Kirkham, vice president and director of planning and support at ANICO. "What it takes instead is a clear definition of business objectives, support from business and IT, good scope management, a realistic schedule. Putting down a methodology and making the artifacts available show people there are skills they can learn, and we suddenly have a much deeper pool of people who can manage projects."

On an individual level, companies should support training in project management, such as from the Project Management Institute (PMI), for staff members in any area who are interested in becoming managers. Supporting staff education is more important than whether or not this training leads to actual PMI certification. "[Certification] is helpful, but in and of itself it won't make someone a good leader. You can have someone who's a good leader and not have the certification and vice versa," Tubiana points out.

Aetna began completely revamping its project management approach in 2003, achieving CMMI level two in 18 months and putting itself on track for level three in February 2007. As the carrier did this, it also worked on developing what McCarthy calls a "high-performance culture" that encourages teamwork by including training in project management.

"When we started, we had about 20 PMI-certified people. We wanted to train all our managers to pass the certification exam, even though we don't require the certification," she reports. Today all managers–more than 180–have completed the training, and 68 have taken the initiative to obtain the certification.

3. Create an ownership society.

"'Without involvement there is no commitment,'" says Kirkham, quoting leadership guru Stephen Covey. Best-practices carriers have been shifting the ownership of systems and projects to business, giving both business and IT a mutual interest in project success and leading to greater involvement and teamwork.

ANICO has emphasized business ownership of projects at the earliest project stage. "In the past, business had used IT resources to create the project charter," Kirkham explains. "But by now having those [charter] artifacts available, we've moved toward more business ownership in the creation of the charter. We essentially said, 'If this really is a good business case, you [business] guys need to get some skin in the game.'"

Penn National is in the midst of a predictive data analytics project that builds on a recently completed data warehouse project. In this project, the sponsor is the company's senior underwriting officer. "Senior sponsors make sure projects get done and the project team has the resources it needs," Jenkins says. "Predictive analytics has major implications not just from a technology standpoint but also from cultural, staffing, and organizational standpoints, so it was important to have business own the project."

"We don't manage a project that doesn't have a business executive sponsor and business ownership," notes Aetna's McCarthy.

Currently available technology has itself helped facilitate this transfer of ownership. "It used to be business analysts said, 'Here's what we need–now go and program it.' Today tools allow the business to make configuration changes rather than what used to be coding changes," Weber says. As a result, "there's a definite trend toward putting business in ownership of systems and removing the split between the roles of business and IT that is both expensive and inefficient," he adds.

4. Trite but true: There is no "I" in "team."

In the legends of Camelot, the Round Table in King Arthur's Court implied no single knight seated there was more important than any other. While literal interpretation of this practice isn't important (although designating a Siege Perilous seat may be tempting), the philosophy is.

"You want to be sure you have business and IT equally represented at a steering committee level. Without either one, you're going to have resentment," Tubiana cautions.

Conklin reports ACUITY's enterprise technology management committee consists of her and the vice presidents of IT and services. This structure ensures no one constituency is the sole project driver. "We all have equal representation in the project process," Conklin says.

Beyond equal representation, a company should be willing to share the rewards equally that come with project success. Aetna, which instituted a team-based incentive plan within the IT organization in 2006, will expand the program to the business staff next year. The plan is based on a company scorecard, business unit scorecard, and individual scorecard, with half of the bonus calculation based on the achievement of team goals, McCarthy indicates.

5. Teach and learn.

Shared management requires shared understanding. "Insurers need to take the time to educate the business people on technology options, and business needs to take the time to educate the tech people on the business problems they are tackling. Bridge the gap that exists," Tubiana suggests.

This bridging doesn't only help the business side better understand technology in shared project management, but it also facilitates business' finding creative applications of technology to business problems. On the IT-to-business side, it may be IT's job to provide this education, and that involves more than just routing the most recent copy of Tech Decisions to the VP of underwriting.

Penn National offers "Tech Talks" on both IT and project management as brown-bag lunch courses. "Even though all those courses are voluntary, a lot of them 'sell out.' It shows people have interest in project management," says Jenkins.

On the flip side, the insurer makes insurance and business training available to its IT staff. "We also encourage the IT staff, as part of its appraisal objectives, to spend time in the field with our customers, both agents as well as internal customers. We also bring our customers in [to IT] to see how we're doing in certain projects," Jenkins adds.

At Aetna, "we are very fortunate to have a CEO [Ronald A. Williams] who is very tech-savvy," McCarthy says. "He also believes our business owners need to understand the capabilities of what we have and can build on a detailed level. We do a lot of research around enabling technologies, and as our business partners go through their strategic planning sessions, we provide them with information on technologies we believe they might be interested in."

In addition, Aetna goes through a "blueprint process" within each business area. "This is an intensive, multiple-month process where we look at all the capabilities users want over time. And during that process, we bring to those areas information about the technologies that are possible enablers of those capabilities," McCarthy states.

ACUITY's organizational structure facilitates cross-discipline education. (It also doesn't hurt that its president and CEO, Ben Salzmann, used to be the company's CIO.) Four years ago, when it formed the business consulting division, the company put claims and underwriting research and development staff members, who previously had reported to line-of-business units, into the new division along with systems analysts.

"This gives everyone a second perspective," Conklin says. "Since claims and underwriting [R&D] staff members all have been line underwriters and claims representatives, it gives their systems colleagues a better understanding of what the business community is trying to do, enabling them both to optimize processes and effectively manage a project. Likewise, those business staff members get a broader view of technology."

There is a fair amount of common sense implied in any of these five strategies for team building; nevertheless, the history of project management shows mastering the basics is neither automatic nor easy.

"It's effective communication, having regular meetings, having escalating procedures when problems arise," Weber concludes. "Also, at the end of the day, whether or not the team is effective often comes down to whom you have chosen to put in what role, and it takes continued effort to figure that out."