The Challenge

A new benefits administration startup was founded in April, and had to provide a web-based open enrollment for 30 companies and tens of thousands of employees in September. Missing the deadlines would kill the new business.

The Solution

With the scope and timeline fixed, The exact requirement dates of individual features were tracked with multiple releases per week starting in August to provide rolling capabilities to do the web enrollment then provide the outbound data feeds to all the benefits vendors in a series of increments. This allowed the team to build capabilities just-in-time.

• Separate Operational & Systems Teams: Created small group to handle short-term IT & development requirements like onboarding customers and handling short-term requirements separate from team building the SaaS platform. This ensured immediate customer needs were addressed without increasing risk of failure for the fall delivery.
• Local & Remote Contract Development Team: To assemble a team quickly, both local and remote contract staff were hired. At the time (2000) this was uncommon and required early adoption of concepts like remote source control and automated builds and verification of software.

The Results

Initial open enrollment was a success with every customer enrolled online during the fall open enrollment season and data files accepted by vendors prior to the start of the new benefits year.