Case Study

MindView to Manage 600+ 50k - Multimillion Dollar Projects

McKesson

Industry

Health Care

Background

Founded in 1833 and currently ranked 15th on the FORTUNE 500, McKesson helps health care providers improve business health and deliver better care to patients. As a pharmaceutical distributor and health care information technology company, McKesson provides systems for medical supply management, clinical workflow, practice management, pharmacy automation and care management. The company delivers vital medicines, medical supplies and health care information information technology solutions that touch the lives of patients in every health care setting. The depth and breadth of the company’s product and service offerings, coupled with the largest customer base in the health care industry, uniquely position McKesson to meet the needs of its customers. Empowering the evolution of health care, McKesson’s products and services improve the quality of care, eliminate errors, reduce unnecessary costs, synthesize information for physicians, improve the workflow of nurses and free up pharmacists to counsel patients.

The Challenge

McKesson-IT has a large and complex corporate IT infrastructure. Our active project portfolio regularly consists of well over 600 active projects that range from $50k to multi millions of dollars. Projects are introduced thru a variety of channels but one of the most common are Business Requests from any of our multiple internal customers and key stakeholders across our 13 business units. Any of our 40+ PMP and ITIL certified Project Managers are often tasked and challenged wit with quickly breaking down these requests, understanding the underlying business drivers and identifying key technical requirements that help engineers develop estimates for proposals. One particular BR I received was to upgrade the phone system for two (2) large locations so that incoming customer calls could be routed seamlessly across sites based on many factors such as time of day, incoming caller ID, which employees were available and what skills they possessed, etc. The system also had to allow users to login to the system and work remotely.

The Solution

I used MindView to help me document, breakdown, and understand the various drivers of the project using a pure mind-map. I then used the top-down approach to help me decompose the work required uncovering the key technical requirements needed for an accurate estimate. The software also allowed me to draw relationships between work elements helping me to better understand inter-dependencies and helped us to identify new/missing work that affected the estimate accuracy. In the end, this project was delivered precisely on-time, meeting 100% of the originally defined requirements, and was successfully implemented on the 1st attempt and slightly under budget. Those characteristics alone make this project the most successful project I’ve implemented in my five years and over 60 projects managed at McKesson. Looking back, I attribute a lot of the success to how quickly we understood the reason and requirements with the help of MindView.