Thursday, September 26, 2013

Application Development Efficiencies Drive Agile Payoffs for Healthcare Tech Provider TriZetto

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

We’re here the week of June 10 to explore some award-winning case studies from leading enterprises. And we’ll see how a series of innovative solutions and IT transformation approach to better development and test and deployment of applications is benefiting these companies.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how TriZetto has been improving its development processes and modernizing its ability to speed the applications development process, and bring better tools for its internal developers as well as support a lifecycle approach to software.

To learn more about how TriZetto is modernizing its development and deployment capabilities, please join me in welcoming Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Rubina Ansari: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We hear a lot about improving software capabilities, and Agile of course is an important part of that. Tell me where you are in terms of moving to Agile processes, and we’ll get more into how you're enabling that through tools and products?

Ansari: TriZetto currently is going through an evolution. We’re going through a structured waterfall-to-scaled-Agile methodology. As you mentioned, that's one of the innovative ways that we're looking at getting our releases out faster with better quality, and be able to respond to our customers. We realize that Agile, as a methodology, is the way to go when it comes to all those three things I just mentioned.

We're currently in the midst of evolving how we work. We’re going through a major transformation within our development centers throughout the country.

Gardner: And software is very important to your company, tell us why and then a little bit about what TriZetto does?

Ansari: TriZetto is a healthcare software provider. We have the software for all areas of healthcare. Our mission is to integrate different healthcare systems to make sure our customers have seamless information. Over 50 percent of the American insured population goes through our software for their claims processing. So, we have a big market and we want to stay there.

Leaner and faster

Our software is very important to us, just as it is to our customers. We're always looking for ways of making sure we’re leaner, faster, and keeping up with our quality in order to keep up with all the healthcare changes that are happening.

Gardner: You've been working with HP Software and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products for some time. Tell us a little bit about what you have in place, and then let's learn a bit more about the Asset Manager capabilities that you're pioneering?

Ansari
Ansari: We've been using HP tools for our testing area, such as the QTP Products Performance Center and Quality Center. We’ve recently went ahead with ALM 11.5, it has a lot of cross-project abilities. As for agile, we're now using HP Agile Manager.

This has helped us move forward fairly quickly into scaled agile using HP Agile Manager, while integrating with our current HP tools. We wanted to make sure that our tools were integrated and that we didn’t lose that traceability and the effectiveness of having a single vendor to get all our data.

HP Agile Manager is very important to us. It's a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, and it was very easy for us to implement within our company. There was no concept of installing, and the response that we get from HP has been very fast, as this is the first experience we’ve had with a SaaS deliverable from HP.
It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite.

They're following agile, so we get releases every three months. Actually, every few weeks, we get enhancements for defects we may find within their product. It's worked out very well. It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite, which was vital to us.

Gardner: And how large of an organization are you in terms of developers, and how many of them are actively using these products?

Ansari: We have between 500 and 1,000 individuals that make up development teams throughout United States. For Agile Manager, the last time we checked, it was approximately 400. We're hoping to get up to 1,000 by end of this year, so that way everyone is using Agile Manager for all their agile/scrum teams and their backlogs and development.

Gardner: Tell us a bit also about how paybacks are manifesting themselves. Do you have any sense of how much faster you're able to develop? What are the paybacks in terms of quality, traceability, and tracking defects? What's the payback from doing this in the way you have?

Working together

Ansari: We’ve seen some, but I think the most is yet to come in rolling this out. One of the things that Agile Manager promotes is collaboration and working together in a scrum team. Agile Manager, having the software work all around the agile processes, makes it very easy for us to roll an agile methodology.

This has helped us collaborate better between testers and developers, and we're finding those defects earlier, before they even happen. We’ll have more hard metrics around this as we roll this out further. One of the major reasons we went with HP Agile Manager is that it has very good integration with the development tools we use.

They integrate with several development tools, allowing our testers to be able to see what changes occurred, what piece of code has changed for each defect enhancement that the tester would be testing. So that tight integration with other development tools was a very pivotal factor in our decision of going forward with that HP Agile Manager.

Gardner: So Rubina, not only are you progressing from waterfall to agile and adopting more up-to-date tools, but you’ve made this leap to a SaaS-based delivery for this. If that's working out well as you’ve said, do you think this is going to lead to doing more with other SaaS tools and tests and capabilities and maybe even look at cloud platform as a service opportunity?
We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it.

Ansari: Absolutely. This was our first experience and it is going very well. Of course, there were some learning curves and some learning pains. Being able to get these changes so quickly and not having it do it ourselves was kind of a mind shift change for us. We're reaping the benefits from it obviously, but we did have to have a little more scheduled conversations, release notes, and documentation about changes from HP.

We're not new to SaaS. We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it. It was great to be on the receiving end of a SaaS product, knowing that TriZetto themselves are playing that space as well.

Gardner: Tell us what the future holds. Are you going to be adding any additional lifecycle elements moving on this journey, as you've described it? What's next?

Ansari: There's always so much more to improve. What we’re looking for is how to quickly respond to our customers. That means also integrating HP Service Manager and any other tools that may be part of this software testing lifecycle or part of our ability to release or offer something to our clients.

We'll continue doing this until there is no more space for efficiency. But, there are always places where we can be even more effective.

Mobile development

Gardner: How about mobile development? Is that something that’s on your radar and that you’ll be doing more of, given that devices are becoming more popular? I imagine that’s true of your customers too?

Ansari: We've talked about it, but it's really not on our roadmap right now. It hasn't been one of our main priorities.

Gardner: I suppose that you're in a good position to be able to move in that direction should you decide to.

Ansari: Absolutely. There's no doubt. The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space once we plan and do that.
The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space.

Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we’ll leave it there. We’ve been learning about how TriZetto has been moving to a more agile methodology for its development and using a variety of HP software products for Application Lifecycle Management.

So please join me in thanking our guest. We’ve been here with Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. Thank you.

Ansari: Thank you. The pleasure was all mine.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner. Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

at 4:14 PM
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)