Changing a Company's Focus Through Project Management

Computerworld - There's an old adage that says the best time to make a change is when things are going well. What this suggests is that, too often, we wait until things start weakening to make a change. Over a year ago, I decided that my company might be better served by evaluating our position when things are going smoothly—to look for opportunities to make things better and to anticipate events that could create adverse effects.

Our business involves managing compliance among insurance carriers, agents and state regulators. While that sounds simple enough, it is a very complex industry below the surface. Much of what we provide our customers is the management of these complexities by keeping track of regulatory changes and providing tools to manage compliance. However, the way in which we delivered these services was equally complex, and not particularly scalable. We called the shots, and good things happened, but we weren't organized for accepting and processing feedback from our customers, not to mention the market as a whole.

One challenge was that the company was fairly new and had experienced consistent and steady growth but wasn't necessarily well positioned to sustain it. Much of our initial growth was propelled by a rising tide in our market segment that lifted all players. Times were about to change, however; our traditional business was beginning to mature and flatten, and I was brought in by investors to help accelerate growth, as well as to help improve our focus on customers.

We realized that our entire approach to delivering products would have to change. This meant becoming market-driven rather than product-driven—shifting from being internally focused to being externally focused. To help us make this transformation, we created and rolled out a process we call "Catalyst."

Catalyst was a completely new way to roll out products and services to our market. It involved almost everyone in the company. Imagine creating a cross-functional project team that touches every department, with all participants having the same goals and equal opportunity to provide input and linked by a process that keeps plans on track; that was Catalyst.

Catalyst started with the creation of a product management function that represented the "voice of the market" and the "voice of the user." It then added cross-functional core teams—each executive team was empowered to make decisions based on charters issued by the Product Approval Committee.

Reporting to this committee was a 10-person Product Delivery Team that crafted its own version of "agile development" to create Sircon's J2EE-based Producer Express product. The team met every two weeks to review storyboards that illustrated the course of the development effort and Web-based walking skeletons that helped clarify the navigation. From storyboards, the team developed detailed specifications when needed and test cases and test plans for each iteration. It then wrote application programming interfaces to integrate the product for the customer through Web services. The entire process was driven by use-case analysis, determining how customer requirements translated to specific user functions. Finally, the technical integration and interface were tested internally with automated unit tests and test scripts, and by customers via an externally facing user review and test environment in advance of release and full production.