If you have a global project in works and managed care vendors are involved..this is for you.
While Out Sourcing has become common…most companies are still struggling to engage managed care providers into the project mainstream.
Primarliy a lot of void is seen in the area of managed care vendor management and the impetus given to overall support strategy
While I leave the Vendor management for another day to discuss..lets focus on the support stratey today.
Many know overall support strategy & project specific execution is very critical to success, just hiring a few offsite resources may solve immediate needs…but certainly is not strategic in the long run.
What is the point of inception?, what phase in the project lifecycle should a P1 managed care support plan be devised?.
While the managed care vendor is engaged with the project from early stages, the support plan is not something that is a must from the early stages.
While the logical answer is late development/ QA, not many projects have active QA cycles, reasons…. tight timelines, resource limiations and budget constraints.
So why in QA? Why not in concept commit or design phase?
Well most large implementations tend to mature right around the QA phase. Tech Leads and Project Managers tend to understand the true complexity right in this phase. As we all know, a graceful exit from the phase means success is gauranteed.
Create a separate plan for just managing offshore support activities and tie it into the overall project plan. The “managed care support plan” is a detailed step by step instruction on how to deal with data issues, process issues and as well as any fallouts that may occur with all aspects of the implementation. While transferring the complete responsibility of your application support to a managed care provider many not make immediate sense,(when you foresee enhancements to the application in future) just engaging them on mundane tasks many not be productive either. So balance it??¦