PM Network - December 2014

Cleaning Up the House

After the ACA became law in 2010, Amerigroup revised its PMO’s charter to focus exclusively on the organization’s top strategic priority: growth. When Ms. Arcari began leading the PMO that year, she realized that formalizing processes and tools was the first order of business. At that point, Ms. Arcari notes, each time a new contract was won, “we started from zero as if we had never done the work before.” At that point in the game, the PMO’s reputation wasn’t exactly sterling.

So the team overhauled its approach to align it with PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). “We set all of our activities next to the PMBOK® Guide, and we did a 100 percent mapping of them to one of the five process groups of project management,” she says. “Anything that couldn’t clearly map was discontinued.” What emerged now serves as the bedrock for the PMO’s success: scalable, repeatable frameworks for project execution. As the PMO grew—from 17 practitioners in 2010 to 58 today—its standardized approach helped project teams working across the organization cohere. “It gives us all a common language and expectation, all the way up to our executive sponsor level,” Ms. Arcari says.

Since the reboot, the team has followed a policy of total transparency, which allows anyone at WellPoint to view project, program and portfolio-level reporting through shared online tools. The move helped build support from project sponsors and internal stakeholders.

Remaining flexible and responsive to each project’s needs also shifted the organization’s project culture in the PMO’s favor, says Joe Hashemi, PMP, director of change management, GBD, WellPoint, Virginia Beach, Virginia. “We tried to not get so stuck on process, methodology and forms, to avoid being considered rigid and to ensure people would want to work with us,” says Mr. Hashemi, who was an assistant vice president in the PMO from 2012 to 2014.

With its project tools and its reputation improving, the PMO was ready to take a series of high-stakes tests.

New States of Success

As ACA-related regulations took hold in 2012, the PMO went into overdrive. Tight timelines mandated by government customers forced the team to master its scalable, repeatable approach to projects. With at least one project going live at the start of every month, the PMO grew the organization’s total annual revenue by nearly 50 percent compared to 2011.

Top strategic initiatives included launching new Medicaid managed-care insurance plans and services in three new state markets. Drawing on lessons learned while launching in previous states, project teams worked with subject experts across many of the GBD’s 74 functional areas to rapidly execute projects in compliance with new contracts. The project