Pulsebyte Case Study - Safe Agile Infrastructure

Project Context

Our Team stands as the vanguard, embarked on a Lean Safe Agile (LSA) transformation journey to enhance its project management and delivery processes. The aim was to achieve faster time-to-market, improve collaboration, and ensure adaptability to changing market demands.

Challenge

The large federal healthcare organization encountered several challenges in handling its intricate IT ecosystem:

Overseeing more than 70 simultaneous projects across 15 business divisions
Adopting efficient and uniform project management and Agile practices
Silos and Lack of Collaboration: Teams operated in silos, impeding effective communication and teamwork.
Inflexible Processes: Conventional project management methods resulted in slow response times and challenges in adapting to changes.
Unclear Roles and Responsibilities: Uncertainty in roles and responsibilities led to confusion and delays in decision-making.

Solution

Agile Framework Implementation: Adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to facilitate seamless collaboration among multiple teams.

Training and Skill Development: Conducted extensive training programs to ensure that teams were well-versed in Agile principles and methodologies.

Clear Definition of Roles: Defined distinct roles and responsibilities to improve accountability and facilitate decision-making.

Key Results & Positive Outcomes

Improved Time-to-Market: Outcomes included reducing deployment cycles 55%, cutting change approval backlog 80%, and lowering incident resolution time 62%, enabling quicker delivery of products and features.

Enhanced Collaboration: Cross-functional teams working collaboratively, leading to better communication and shared understanding.

Increased Productivity: Teams reported higher productivity levels, with a 20% increase in completed user stories per sprint.

TRANSFORMATIONAL SUCCESSES

Diversifying HealthCare Provider Screenings

A client’s reliance on a solitary vendor for healthcare provider criminal history posed significant risks: a single point of failure, no cross-verification of data integrity, and a lack of cost competitiveness. Our Team's Lean-Agile specialists equipped our adept Product Management team to work hand-in-glove with the client, meticulously planning and executing a re-engineered application. This innovative solution championed a multi-vendor screening functionality, enabling the integration of new vendors via a configuration-first methodology with minimal coding requirements. The system could now deftly handle multiple licensure vendors, aggregating and processing data to produce comprehensive flags and reports, thereby enhancing reliability and competitive pricing.

Enhancing Federal IT Operations

Previously disjointed and inefficient, the IT operations of a key federal agency faced the challenge of integrating multiple technical services, from AWS cloud migrations to infrastructure management. Our Team's tackled this by orchestrating a Lean-Agile transformation, employing essential elements from Systems Thinking to dissect and reassemble the workflow supporting various departments and vendors. Centralizing the fragmented projects into a singular, preferred Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool and adopting selected practices from SAFe and ITSM, we instilled clarity and cohesion. This methodical reorganization, driven by continuous customer collaboration, resulted in transparent, prioritized, and aligned operations. The transformation not only streamlined processes but also earned commendation from the agency’s COO, marking a milestone in operational excellence.

Streamlining Fraud Investigation Processes

Faced with a dated and cumbersome system, end users at a Federal client were resorting to makeshift solutions for investigation management, leading to inconsistent workflows and fragmented data handling. Our Team's tapped into our reservoir of Lean-Agile expertise, particularly in SAFe and Value Stream Management to marshal our Human-Centered Design mavens and specialized stream-aligned Application Development Pods in a collaborative effort to engineer a state-of-the-art new version. This new version unified disparate systems, enabling real-time data sharing and standardized data fields for precise trend analysis. The transformation allowed for swift, informed decision-making within the investigation lifecycle, significantly enhancing productivity and strategic capability for our federal client.

Enabling Strategic Forecasting In Financial Management

A government agency struggled with prioritizing and forecasting resolutions for a high volume of unpredictable support tickets in its Financial Management System. Our Team's Lean-Agile experts collaborated with the agency's business and technical teams, applied Lean statistical methods to analyze ticket patterns and sources, assessed delivery capabilities, and used that deep insight to devise a resilient and optimized prioritization strategy. This approach empowered the agency to predict change delivery times, manage their workload effectively, and establish a plan for ongoing improvement.