At Blue Shield of California, our TBMO has a great working relationship with our users, and especially with our "super users."  We bounce ideas off of these super users, and even have recurring meetings on the calendar with them.  The purpose of these meetings is to get feedback on their experience in the tool, find out anything we can do better to help them, troubleshoot issues, and discuss any enhancement ideas they would like to see in the tool.  That last point lead to a discussion during one of these meetings earlier this year where one of our super users asked if it was possible to automate the monthly updates she makes in her IT Planning Labor tab.  She had her list of requirements for fields that would need to potentially update each month, so all she needed was the sign off from us.  Knowing that Apptio is a proponent of automation, and Blue Shield of California has become a big proponent of it this year as well, she got the thumbs up that this was possible to automate.

Next, came tracking down the reports that would be needed to make this possible, as well as brainstorming how this will look and work in TBM Studio.  The end result was two tables to house the raw labor data, a table to house the existing labor data from IT Planning, a table where all of the updates take place, and finally, a table that cleans up all of the column headers and removes the columns that IT Planning doesn't like when importing into the tool.

In short, what took six budget administrators a combined 30 hours a month to update, now removes the chance of manual entry error and only takes minutes to complete and import back into IT Planning.

Lessons Learned

• Technical Skills aren't always enough when configuring tables. Sometimes the data you're working with doesn't contain what you need, so you need to think creatively about how you can get it to contain what you need before receiving it.
  • Sometimes you need to create a new process for how data is entered when a process did not previously exist.

• Anticipate what your users will want before they know they want it.

• Think ahead. Constructing tables and writing formulas in such a way that it leaves room for future enhancement will save time and make it much easier to evolve the tables as enhancement opportunities present themselves.

You can read the full case study in the attached file.

@Debbie Hagen
@Michael Darragh�
@William Chancellor
@Joel Schalla

#ACE
#Case Study
#Automation
#ITP
#Labor
#TBMStudio
#ETBMA

At Blue Shield of California, our TBMO has a great working relationship with our users, and especially with our "super users."  We bounce ideas off of these super users, and even have recurring meetings on the calendar with them.  The purpose of these meetings is to get feedback on their experience in the tool, find out anything we can do better to help them, troubleshoot issues, and discuss any enhancement ideas they would like to see in the tool.  That last point lead to a discussion during one of these meetings earlier this year where one of our super users asked if it was possible to automate the monthly updates she makes in her IT Planning Labor tab.  She had her list of requirements for fields that would need to potentially update each month, so all she needed was the sign off from us.  Knowing that Apptio is a proponent of automation, and Blue Shield of California has become a big proponent of it this year as well, she got the thumbs up that this was possible to automate.

Next, came tracking down the reports that would be needed to make this possible, as well as brainstorming how this will look and work in TBM Studio.  The end result was two tables to house the raw labor data, a table to house the existing labor data from IT Planning, a table where all of the updates take place, and finally, a table that cleans up all of the column headers and removes the columns that IT Planning doesn't like when importing into the tool.

In short, what took six budget administrators a combined 30 hours a month to update, now removes the chance of manual entry error and only takes minutes to complete and import back into IT Planning.

Lessons Learned

• Technical Skills aren't always enough when configuring tables. Sometimes the data you're working with doesn't contain what you need, so you need to think creatively about how you can get it to contain what you need before receiving it.
  • Sometimes you need to create a new process for how data is entered when a process did not previously exist.

• Anticipate what your users will want before they know they want it.

• Think ahead. Constructing tables and writing formulas in such a way that it leaves room for future enhancement will save time and make it much easier to evolve the tables as enhancement opportunities present themselves.

You can read the full case study in the attached file.

@Debbie Hagen
@Michael Darragh�
@William Chancellor
@Joel Schalla

#ACE
#Case Study
#Automation
#ITP
#Labor
#TBMStudio
#ETBMA

At Blue Shield of California, our TBMO has a great working relationship with our users, and especially with our "super users."  We bounce ideas off of these super users, and even have recurring meetings on the calendar with them.  The purpose of these meetings is to get feedback on their experience in the tool, find out anything we can do better to help them, troubleshoot issues, and discuss any enhancement ideas they would like to see in the tool.  That last point lead to a discussion during one of these meetings earlier this year where one of our super users asked if it was possible to automate the monthly updates she makes in her IT Planning Labor tab.  She had her list of requirements for fields that would need to potentially update each month, so all she needed was the sign off from us.  Knowing that Apptio is a proponent of automation, and Blue Shield of California has become a big proponent of it this year as well, she got the thumbs up that this was possible to automate.

Next, came tracking down the reports that would be needed to make this possible, as well as brainstorming how this will look and work in TBM Studio.  The end result was two tables to house the raw labor data, a table to house the existing labor data from IT Planning, a table where all of the updates take place, and finally, a table that cleans up all of the column headers and removes the columns that IT Planning doesn't like when importing into the tool.

In short, what took six budget administrators a combined 30 hours a month to update, now removes the chance of manual entry error and only takes minutes to complete and import back into IT Planning.

Lessons Learned

• Technical Skills aren't always enough when configuring tables. Sometimes the data you're working with doesn't contain what you need, so you need to think creatively about how you can get it to contain what you need before receiving it.
  • Sometimes you need to create a new process for how data is entered when a process did not previously exist.

• Anticipate what your users will want before they know they want it.

• Think ahead. Constructing tables and writing formulas in such a way that it leaves room for future enhancement will save time and make it much easier to evolve the tables as enhancement opportunities present themselves.

You can read the full case study in the attached file.

@Debbie Hagen
@Michael Darragh�
@William Chancellor
@Joel Schalla

#ACE
#Case Study
#Automation
#ITP
#Labor
#TBMStudio
#ETBMA