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Background: 

This top 10 State embarked on installing Microsoft’s O365 software and concurrently migrating its existing email system to the Cloud. The scope included Agencies, Boards and Commissions and quasi-public/private Bureaus. The project enjoyed strong executive and technical support from Microsoft, Agency executives and all participants technical staffs. The initial implementations proved to be negatively impacting to daily operations, significant day 2 cleanup and a resultant poor reputation for the software, all project participants and affecting both the transition and the new daily operations

Our Role:

The State CIO asked Mineter & Companies, LLC, to begin to participate in the weekly Steering Committee meetings (State CIO, Microsoft executives, Agencies CIOs representatives, and technical staff) and begin to assess how this project could be made fully successful. Mineter attended the Steering Committee meetings, daily implementation meetings, client site briefings, implementation meetings and observed the Day 1 and Day 2, both at central and at the client site, triage processes. We noted the following:

· The client was never given a complete overview of the project, detailing the various steps involved and their participation for success. 

· The client was given a significant amount of technical and training documentation links to peruse, without any clear indication of what was important or necessary to consume for a successful outcome.

· Excellent detail was provided to the client on what needed to be accomplished to clean up the existing mailbox footprint. This detail included substantive tools to actionalize the process. In most cases, the client’s technical staff had day jobs and this undertaking was burdensome and not undertaken successfully

· There was no clear success criteria for the pilot users within the client and the “Go No-Go” decision window was the night before the transition was to occur

· The training materials were distributed via links to the material, again without priority or relevance to what matter for success.

· There was lack of understanding for the pilot users of the relationships that got broken when one participant was in the Cloud and the other was on Premise. A simple example was an executive, showing their support for the initiative by being a pilot Cloud user, but his executive assistant was left on premise. This completely disabled simple but most important daily operations like Calendaring.

· There were a number of software glitches that had not been remediated timely and totally. These resulted in client impacting changes and service outages during the business day

Results:

Having identified the various shortcomings in the entire process, Mineter, along with a loaned project manager from one of the agencies instituted the following changes:

· Hard copy and electronic copies of all of the salient, requisite training and technical material were created, with clear reference to importance and role within the project. This material was disseminated at the Kick-off meeting. The handout was bound, with an easily reference table of contents, in priority order, for both technical and user consumption. Electronic renditions of all material were also available.

·  A Kick-off was scheduled at the client’s location and a Power Point presentation was compiled that outlined, in laymen terms, the entire process from beginning to post transition support, roles and responsibilities, checkpoints, Go-Live criteria and delineating fundamental concepts for everyone to understand. Examples included the relationships that get broken when one party moves to the Cloud and the other remains on premise.

· Following the Kick-off meeting, we scheduled a 2nd meeting (usually post Kick-off, same day) with the Client’s technical staff to go over the clean-up process for the existing mailbox foot print. What changed going forward is we delineated the exact state-of-the-state and what work was required prior to implementation but proposed we, central IT, do all the work, with guidance from the client. We demonstrated the before and after state and how we assured quality prior to Go-Live and our commitment to the partnership that we would follow their guidance and gain concurrence throughout the process.

· The criteria for pilot participation was revamped to insure as much success within the pilot window as possible.

· We changed the Go-Live decision window to at least one if not two weeks before the transition was to begin. This gave everyone a quiet period for more training, to correct any late developing issues, further clarification if required and lowered the hesitancy and nervousness level significantly.

· We orchestrated a new, non-client impacting patch and software remediation process that made changes off-business hours

For the Day 2 process, we had plenty of staff available for triage but kept them out of sight unless required. Prior, there were technical folks floating all around the operation, creating disruption that was not necessary. We streamlined the problem reporting process, assigned particular issues to the most relevant person to give staff confidence of rapid and complete error resolution 

Highlights:  

· Stabilization

· ICD-10 Upgrade

· Affordable Care Act and Integrated Eligibility Implementation

· Medicaid Expansion 

· Sun Solaris to HPUX conversion ultimately creating Medicaid as a Cloud Service

​Background

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) approved our State client's plan for the new Medicaid system and selected our client as an early adopter state for their new Medicaid Information Technology System, (MITS). A year later, the Department of Job and Family Services identified approximately 3,000 business requirements that were needed to support the business needs of ever-evolving Medicaid program. This system went live 5 years later under conditions that could best be described as "turbulent". While meeting the needs of the State, the operational situation with the system and future roadmap considerations required a herculean effort on the part of the State and the Vendor to stabilize, operate and enhance the system in light of evolving parameters associated with administering Medicaid Statewide. 

Our Role

2 years post go-live, Mineter partnered with the State to perform a strategic assessment of the vendor's performance to date, the roles/responsibilities between the parties, joint delivery commitments and the operating and investment model for the system. Based on this assessment, several outcomes were implemented for the betterment of the system, the State and the vendor, and to providers and patients across the State. They included:​

• Resolved several lingering, major billing and reimbursement system problems
• Dividing the Medicaid organization into six (6) Business areas to align the various business units within Medicaid to develop and vet, appropriately and succinctly, their business requirements for MITS
• Restructuring of the relationship between the State and the Vendor;
• Defining a multi-year, release based roadmap that was grounded in reality and available funding;
• Implementing ITIL/CoBIT quality processes and technical tools to manage releases, code and increase the requisite environments for success; 
• Instituted new quality assurance and implementation processes, resulting very high quality software releases
• Developed a new problem reporting and tracking capacity resulting in rapid and correct resolution of issues 
• Replacement of the vendor delivery team, almost in its entirety, to reset the relationship between the parties.

Having achieved excellence in daily operations and software releases, Mineter was asked to continue their role as Project Executive for:

· International Classification of Diseases (ICD) upgrade to V.10. As the USA was one of the last countries in the world to adopt this version, first time and very high quality implementation was paramount. This initiative was on-time, on budget and implemented with excellence.

· The Affordable Care Act (ACA) connections to Health.gov, accompanied with a complete rewrite of the 30 year old eligibility systems, necessitated major integration with MITS. This effort required a complete new set of environments (complete sets for development and production) to effectively test and integrate with the existing MITS environment and the ICD upgrade. Now maintaining 24 environments, the iterative changes continued to be highly successful

· Medicaid expansion, funded as a separate initiative by the ACA, resulted in expanding the Medicaid population from 1.8mn to 2.25mn recipients. This growth was effectively managed without any system aberrations or daily operations challenges

· Last, as a result of a new contract and work order process, the existing Sun Solaris operation system was migrated to HPUX and to a 3rd party data center effectively creating MITS as a Cloud Service. 36 sets of environments were required to absorb the changes from all of the initiatives noted about and for the migration to the Cloud

The total contract value is in excess of $220M, and since being executed has exceeded all expectations of quality, timeliness and performance and serves an example for all States in how to best operate and maintain Medicaid systems nationally.

Background:

This top 10 state received approval to completely replace their existing Workers Compensation Insurance system. The driving factors included moving from a retrospective insurance payment plan to prospective payment process; technical malleability to adapt successfully to the continual evolving technology opportunities in the marketplace and interfacing with a widening range of partners; and to adopt the latest technology to insure the technical talent required for successful daily operations was in abundance for the future. The project was to go-live at the beginning of the new fiscal year.

Challenge:

The project was intended to be a “Commercial-Off-The-Shelf” software deployment, with no customization. The work processes inside the Bureau were supposed to change or adapt to the new software. Almost from the inception of the project, change after change was introduced, which elongated the complexity and added time to the project timeline. Additionally, the CEO of the Bureau had announced to the legislature and the public that the new payment process would be in place for the July new budget year.

Our Role:

5 months prior to the intended go-live date, the State CIO asked Mineter & Companies, LLC to conduct a three (3) day assessment on the project to determine:

· Could the July deadline be met successfully?

· And if yes, what would be required to actionalize the already announced payment plans changes?

· Given the massive scope changes precipitated in the project, was the project still viable, understanding the project budget was totally expended or encumbered?

· And if the project was to go forward, what changes are required within the Bureau, with the Prime and the Sub to insure a truly sustainable successful outcome?

The executive teams of the Bureau, Prime and Sub-contractors and the State procurement office were assembled to hear the outcome of the three (3) day assessment:

· The project could not go live by July and create the new payment processes

· The communications between the Bureau, Prime and Sub contractors were in a complete state of failure

· To meet the deadline, the new payment processes needed to be installed in the legacy system or a request to delay the new payment process had to be made to the Legislature

· A further nine (9) day assessment is required to determine if the project can be completed with high quality and usable sustainability.

The result of this conversation was to proceed with the assessment of the viability of the project; work with the assumption the new payment processes would, in all likelihood, be installed in the legacy systems, as it was not politically viable to delay the announced payment processes; make any and all recommendations, regardless of roles or project participants, as to what changes will be required for success; and, if the project could not be saved, recommend next steps for the future technology state for Bureau of Workers Compensation (BWC).

Results:

Having gain concurrence from all parties that the project was viable and would be successful, Mineter, as the project executive, effected the following actions:

1. Resources were re-allocated to install the new payment processes in the legacy systems and the new payment processes were successfully implemented at the beginning of the fiscal year, July 01.

2. The project manager for the Prime Contractor (Prime) was replaced and additional senior oversight executives were assigned and required to be onsite at BWC, weekly, for at least 3 contiguous days

3. A very senior project manager resource was added by the Subcontractor (Sub), which was key to the success of the project

4. The BWC project manager was replaced

5. Oracle experts were deployed to correct the numerous database performance issues and, with excellent cooperation from the DASD manufacturer, detailed analysis and remediation resulted outstanding performance from both the hardware and software.

6. Quality assurance was completed revamped and a new, external resource was added to implement and assure continuity in the process changes

7. The application release contents were packaged at 75% capacity to accommodate the number of consistently late changes manifested in the delivery process

8. The Dev Ops process was evaluated and completely redesigned to assure continuity of quality and success.

9. The Batch cycle (which had never previously run more than 25 of the 74 jobs required) was fully tested, assured, and placed in an automated job scheduler.

10. Full cooperation from the Sub allowing BWC and their development resources to continually tuned inefficient queries fostering excellent communication and cooperation in remediating poorly performing database jobs

11. Daily 3:00 pm meetings were held, with all project participants on hand, to discuss issues, successes and progress toward implementation

12. Weekly Town Meetings were implemented to keep the entire BWC employee base fully up to date on the project status and challenges

13. Given the number of product changes (188) implemented in the code, a new complementary shadow system was created to insure BWC could successfully assimilate the annual software releases from the Sub 

14. Noting the 100 man years of effort to generate the reports from the existing ETL platform, HP Vertica and R were incorporated into the project so the new November implementation date could be met

15. A new, consistent infrastructure software patch process was designed, implemented and incorporated into daily operations

16. Full Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and Implementation and Rollback processes were fully and continually tested.

The new system was implemented in November, with excellent success and the Bureau enjoys daily success of a system that can meet its business requirements, customer needs and adapt to the ever changing regulatory climate.

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