Interview Story - Overcame Challenge
When I was working as a project manager at Canada Benefits Corp, my employer launched a new business venture to provide health benefits (dental, prescriptions, eyeglasses, and hearing aids) to employees of 5,000 medical and dental clinics in the province. The system was designed to track employer contributions and employee claims and provide payments to care providers. However, the venture was launched and started lining up customers before we could build the computer system that processed the transactions.
An outside consultant was hired to write the program for the new business, but the delivery of this program wasn’t expected for a full 5 months. And as a new product, my company didn’t even know what this program should look like. My task was to both help the outside consultants design this system on schedule, and make the business work before the software was ready.
Starting without the computer system, we had to account for premiums and claims manually. It was important that we knew the net position of each employer. If claims were greater than premiums, we had to ask the employer to replenish their contribution/premiums.
Initially, we stored this data in an Excel spreadsheet, but it quickly became apparent that there was too much data for a spreadsheet and too much room for error in its data entry. We would need a centralized database. Working with our data entry teams, I also recognized that there were patterns in provider fees, and storing this fee schedule in our database could help us avoid errors.
I began discussing these findings with our software consultants and internal IT team so that they could integrate this information into their software design. Unfortunately, we were just a few weeks into this project and still months from a usable program. Our spreadsheets weren’t holding up. We needed a database system ASAP.
From that moment, it took 3 very long weeks for me to build a database in Access to capture the data we needed to administer the project effectively before the computer program was written. Based on our experience with the spreadsheets, I built a data entry screen for my staff to input the names of the employer, employee, and their dependents, their benefits, premiums received and claims paid. I then sat with my staff as I demonstrated the software. Then they tested it. I realized that my interface wasn’t as intuitive for them as it was for me, so made some adjustments based on our conversations together.
Once ready, the staff quickly adapted to the database, though I had to continually update it for new types of claims. As a result of this work, the database sustained us for 4 months until the computer program was written. We were able to track the net position and produce the monthly financial statements for the new business.
My successes and frustrations guided the work of our software development consultants. They were able to adjust the final product, using the lessons from this “prototype”. In fact, the formal computer program reflected the input screen which I designed in Access. As a result, when we launched the new software, our staff were able to transition without any lost time.