Project Management for Insurance

Why Project Insight

Challenges to overcome

• Managed project management manually with whiteboards and spreadsheets
• No efficient way of delivering schedules and project plans
• No way to allocate and account for resources' workloads

National Western Life is a thriving life insurance company with a growing number of projects for its information technology (IT) department. When the company's chief administration officer (CAO) set a goal of creating a project management structure and process that would begin with a huge system upgrade and continue for all projects in the future, a project management consultant was hired to manage the implementation and adoption process. 

"The CAO is definitely a project management guy," the project management consultant said. "When National Western Life began planning this huge system upgrade project, he wanted to put a system in place so that the organization would be able to provide real-time project information- schedules, plans, and so on. The main idea was that we needed to establish a project plan with schedules to allocate resources and to be able to monitor the number of hours spent per project." The information captured the costs associated with the system upgrade and other significant projects for the organization.  

The Results

What they liked about Project Insight:

• Centralized, web based project management
• Provides a simple way to track time and status for both internal and external team members
• Enables effective resource allocation
• Delivers useful reports
• Real-time financials making it possible to capitalize and expense project costs

The project consultant described the program that would kick off the new phase of project management within the company, stating, "The one major project is the main administration system that we're upgrading. That project plan alone now has over 110,000 hours to date and has multiple subprojects within it." With over 150 people logging time, it's now a simple matter to provide financial information to the CAO.

"We're able to monitor how many hours are being spent per project. We do weekly and monthly status reports based on project plans, and we're also able to capitalize the costs associated with this new system enhancement, which is another important aspect of using Project Insight," he noted. "We capture all those hours, then I extract them on a monthly basis so that we can capitalize and expense them for accounting purposes. The key for us is to get organized and monitor those projects so that we can identify where we stand, whether we're ahead or behind, and establish that estimate at completion (EAC). We also have third party vendors working with us, so we need to make sure that they're responsible or their hours and meeting their deliverables on time as scheduled."

"Project Insight has helped us manage all of the projects related to the system upgrade program… and one of the main reasons we selected Project Insight is because we felt that their customer support is superior to all the other companies that we were evaluating." Even now if I have a question on Project Insight, I'm able to give my sales representative a call and say, "Hey, I have a question here and she pretty much drops everything and really supports me in that way, which has been a great experience." The consultant concluded, "We really feel like Metafuse is working with us. Project Insight is a good product, and it really helps us support our projects."