Healthcare
Concept to Customer at Centene
Concept to Customer at Centene is the framework B. Eric Fullerton built inside one division of Centene, a healthcare company, while he worked there as a full-time senior agile coach. It took work from idea to customer, and it later became PPM4Agile.
Challenge
What was the problem?
The division sat alongside an enterprise PMO that was working toward a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence. It had an agile PMO, plenty of trained scrum masters, and a stated commitment to SAFe. What it did not have was one framework everyone worked from. Groups ran in silos and stepped on each other’s toes over who got to decide. Tools were not configured for the people using them or connected to each other, so work dropped between them. Senior leaders had no backlog of their own showing how the work traced to goals, and the division was barely using metrics at all.
Approach
What was put in place?
Eric coached the teams on their Scrum practice and helped leadership set goals and objectives the work could be traced to. He built backlogs for the delivery teams and for senior leadership, trained vice presidents on agile and on running a framework, and helped configure Jira so the right metrics, reports, and visibility were there for governance. He put key metrics on dashboards and taught leaders to act on them instead of only discussing them. He helped interview and hire staff, brought new people up to speed, and was dropped into struggling teams to work through friction with their business partners. Underneath it all he sketched Concept to Customer: the workflow every work item moves through, the roles involved at each point, the meetings where governance decisions get made, how the tools are configured, and the artifacts that record decisions.
Results
What changed?
- The division began working more as one group across roles and meetings, instead of as a set of silos.
- Everyone could see the workflow from idea to customer, so bottlenecks, idle time, and areas to improve stood out.
- Senior leaders had a backlog of their own and could trace the work to the goals it served.
- Metrics moved onto dashboards and into decisions, not just status meetings.
- Concept to Customer became the basis of PPM4Agile, and Eric later returned to Centene through StudioBE.
What can other organizations learn from Concept to Customer?
The lesson from Concept to Customer is that training and tools are not the same as a working framework. The division already had an enterprise PMO, an agile PMO, trained scrum masters, and SAFe. It still worked in silos, because nobody could see how one group’s output became the next group’s input, and the tools that should have shown it were not connected. The fix was not another certification class. It was one lightweight, end-to-end framework that named the workflow, the roles, the meetings, the metrics, the tools, and the artifacts, so everyone knew where they fit and what they owed the next person. Once the workflow was visible, people could collaborate on it, spot bottlenecks and idle time, and improve it themselves. Any organization that says it already does agile but still misses its deadlines can start in the same place: make the whole system visible, then get everyone working from it.
A PPM4Agile Implementation follows a similar arc. It starts with a 60-minute Portfolio Clarity Session.
By StudioBEPublished Last reviewed
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