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Insurance Provider Meets Health.gov Deadline

By: Agile Velocity | Aug 03, 2017 |  Case Study

A leading health insurance provider was faced with the challenge of offering online benefits enrollment through Healthcare.gov.

Unique Team Challenges

The baseline assessment uncovered ways in which process and culture contributed to slow value delivery. Challenges include:

Large number of requirements

Changing Regulatory Requirements
Teams had to be aware and be able to adjust to meet changing regulatory requirements.

Struggling technical practices
Integration challenges due to poor documentation and availability of test environments.

Our Solution

Agile Velocity Scrum coaches worked on location and implemented the Scrum framework with the team. At the completion of the assessment period, coaches worked with all levels of the organization to accomplish the following:

Focus on users
Focusing on users creates a bias towards action and the delivery of highly valuable solutions. The use of story mapping, dedicated UX team members, and frequent usability testing were effective in keeping everyone focused on what’s really important.

Rehauled communication between product management and stakeholders
Commercial tools can easily be supplemented with custom tools to provide the appropriate visibility to the health of the release. This helped to make the tools support the process and not the other way around.

Testing a shared responsibility
Making testing a shared responsibility led to creative and effective solutions that can satisfy broad scenario coverage and deal with unreliable integration test environments. Test cases were discussed by the team early and often and team members had free license to create, abandon, or find new tools that would help them be more effective.

Key Takeaways from the Client

The release was constrained by the open enrollment date and features were prioritized regularly to accommodate changing requirements and user feedback.  Frequent release tracking and reporting allowed better and more timely decisions to be made.  Integration challenges were overcome through proper dependency management, automated testing frameworks, and removal of highly visible project impediments. Agile enabled the release of a valuable tool to support indirect enrollment inquiries in just 6 weeks and a full online enrollment tool in 8 months.

Measurable business outcomes include:

  • Immovable deadline MET

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