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
BEST OF THE BEST
“When you’re
recognized by
a jury of your
peers on a global
basis, it’s a
career highlight.
I feel immense
pride in my staff
and what they’ve
accomplished
over the last
four years.”
—Sarina Arcari, PMP, on being
named a PMO of the Year finalist