Francesc E. Rul-lan Solana

The client was a market-leading insurance company that had been very successful in the past but was now threatened by fiercer competition and new, more innovative entrants.

They hired us to support the successful implementation of their ambitious strategic plan. Specifically, they asked us to support the three most critical initiatives within the plan, which were going to be executed by adopting an Agile approach as part of what was seen as a test for a future scale-up of the approach.

In that context, I led a team of six agile experts, partly from my firm and partly from the client, that was tasked with ensuring that those three initiatives met their OKRs and demonstrated that Agile was a positive approach for the future of the company.

MY RESPONSIBILITIES
• Leading overall PMO in direct liaison with internal and external executives.
• Adopting a scrum master role in three of the nine squads, directly supporting the three POs and all squad members to achieve their objectives, manage risks, and ensure progress.
• Providing Agile training to more than 100 contributors.
• Leading preparation of two quarterly business review sessions and full-day workshops in which a strategic review of all squads was made.

The client was a market-leading healthcare provider that had historically grown through the acquisition of its competitors and was now facing disparate operating standards and management across its hospitals.

We were hired to support the successful rollout of a new, custom-made hospital management system that was developed to consolidate operating standards and improve the patient experience across its hospitals.

MY RESPONSIBILITIES
• Acting as an assistant PM to the IT director of each hospital, who led the project, which included owning the project's master plan and risk management approach, and chairing periodic meetings to review progress and risks with both the team and the hospital's leadership.
• Leading the go-live stream within each hospital, the objective of which was to carry out the detailed planning of all actions that had to happen in the weeks, hours, and minutes before and after the go-live of the new system, as well as the management of more than support 100 staff that was mobilized for each go-live.

At my departure, all IT directors and general managers I worked with considered my contribution as absolutely critical to the success of each rollout.

Shortly after joining the company, I was surprised by how much it was investing in R&D but how little of it was being decided strategically and with the aim of actually generating an ROI.

It was clear in my mind—we needed a single system and methodology to manage all these investments, from ideation to demoing prototypes to our clients. A system that helped the teams working on the projects manage them better and, at the same time, leverage the projects' metadata, such as tech used, sector addressed, and dates of execution, to create a single source of information that could be used both by internal clients as well as top executives.

I led the creation of that system. My responsibilities included:
• Ideating and implementing the base of the system using Confluence macros and custom-made templates.
• Onboarding and training employees on the use of the system.
• Engaging with and convincing country managers across the group, including UK, Brazil, and Poland, to join the R&D portfolio.
• Leading a team of two QlikView developers to create interactive dashboards to be used for decision-making by the executive team.