Adapting e-commerce & digital operations for an ever-changing world

Our client is a healthcare organization consisting of three hospitals providing a variety of primary and specialty physician services. NorthStar is providing B2B professional services to our client’s marketing organization to lead and manage their website redesign initiative through various project phases. They were looking to replace their existing websites with a fresh, modern, unified web experience that highlights their unique brand, improves the user experience and delivers measurable results in terms of expanded opportunities to recruit patients, physicians and partners through improved content and online services. 

NorthStar needed to capture all of the business drivers from the physician, marketing, and information technology perspectives and ensure alignment amongst all project stakeholders. We knew this would be the key to ensure a clear understanding of the priorities that would guide the discovery and vendor selection process as well as forecast the project initiation timeline for the successful redesign.

NorthStar led the effort in determining the evaluation criteria for vendors, building scoring models, assessing functional requirements, and conducting technical analysis of a variety of content management and provider management platforms. We produced a comprehensive analysis of alternatives looking at key metrics to help inform our client of the most technologically sound and affordable options. 

Our project achieved several projected goals and milestones.  

• Leveraged NorthStar’s rigorous analysis and chose to proceed with NorthStar’s recommended vendors to execute the website redesign.  
• NorthStar guided them through the procurement process building design documentation and process/data flows in order to enable a smooth transition to project initiation. 
• With the help of contracted talent for both content management system and provider management system vendors and initiated their website redesign project. 

NorthStar continues to lead and manage the implementation project through vendor coordination, integration management, operational strategic planning, risk mitigation, and change management oversight.

NorthStar resolves significant customer problems for our client

A leading hospitality company was experiencing delays and long period gaps before identifying issues and crashes on its website and mobile platform causing loss of revenue and impacting customer experiences. Client sought to implement a solution and program that reduced gaps in identifying issues resulting in increased revenue and improved customer experience.

In collaboration with multiple areas within the Clients Digital Organization and utilizing a series of tools and functionality, a 4 phased program was implemented to combat a series of areas and issues that were identified as key drivers:

• Real Time Dashboard
• Proactive Monitoring KPI Dashboards
• Intelligence Alerts
• Communication Plan

Working together, the program proved to be extremely valuable.  Key results: 

• Time to identify issues went from 3.5 days to 3 hours
• $17.5M reduction in lost revenue comparing issues pre-launch vs. post-launch

The request for help

A global media and technology company's Digital Center of Excellence chose NorthStar Solutions Group to develop a content management strategy and save a multi-million-dollar Content Management System (CMS) investment from getting replaced prior to being fully operationalized.  In addition to selecting key technology vendors to partner with, NorthStar focused on changing the mindset to a “one CMS, one site” objective operating on key principles of simplicity, operational efficiency, and business process improvement.  

The challenge

With the project dangerously close to failure and the technology in jeopardy of getting thrown out, the client turned to the management consultants at NorthStar for help. The NorthStar engagement helped them evolve from having an over-customized, disparate system unable to scale to meet the needs of its enterprise stakeholders, to a stable, scalable and highly efficient platform operating on the vendor’s latest technology.  

How NorthStar solved the problem

With NorthStar, our client found a partner with industry leading domain expertise and proven success in implementing and operationalizing content management systems. NorthStar was engaged to augment internal teams and systematically drive improvement in the following ways:  

• Develop a continuous upgrade model  
• Define taxonomies  
• Mature governance and workflow processes  
• Automate configuration and code promotion  
• Upgrade platform infrastructure  
• Create user support and training models  
• Define information and system governance processes  

On-going project and change support

Since engaging with NorthStar in 2013, the company overcame numerous challenges with their CMS platform. In addition to multiple successful upgrades to the latest CMS version, they implemented a new governance model for both content and systems, and adopted a recommended user support and training program.  They also streamlined delivery teams and moved to operating under consolidated code releases on a standard schedule. These changes have resulted in protection of their investment and ability to leverage an enterprise-wide solution across multiple channels for years to come. 

The request

Our client, a top regional healthcare system, had not made any significant technology upgrades in several years and was stale and reaching end-of-life.  Under the leadership of a new CEO, they were trying to update everything at once including migrating their end-of-life CMS to Sitecore, migrating their end-of-life web apps from cold fusion to dot net, migrating their end-of-life security platform, and completely redesigning/rebuilding their website.  In addition, they wanted to launch concurrent projects to replace their existing web tool with a SaaS solution and building brand new functionality for direct scheduling integration, urgent care wait times, and live chat.    

Organizational challenges

Organizational change was a complicating factor because the organization was under new leadership, IT cutbacks, merger with another health system, combining disparate businesses into one website, and industry pressures to do more and more with less.  As a result, the organization was overwhelmed and disorganized.  

In addition, the existing business and IT had several people leave the organization and the remaining staff was tied down in daily maintenance activities and did not have the time to devote to these projects.  They hired consultants to fill the gap, but management was new or inexperienced with projects of this size leading to confusion, gaps, duplicity, and delays.  

Our approach

To resolve these challenges, NorthStar consultants first prioritized all projects and goals. 

• Coordinated a project plan for the Health System project 
• Organized a program plan to manage and report on all of the projects in progress 
• Installed the value of “leadership engagement” to the Health System’s CCO and System Director  
• Met with the resources to identify their activities, sequencing, dependencies, and timing 
• Created the project schedule and got agreement from all the resources and leadership 
• Drove the project forward and created accountability in our status meetings  

The results

NorthStar helped our client to successfully achieve its business objectives and launch the new site on-schedule and with high-quality content as well as demonstrated this successful process and methodology to other project managers to use for future initiatives.

• Coordinated and executed the migration of more than 1,600 content pages and associated imagery to a new Web Content Management System (CMS)
• Provided training and education on the new process for creating and maintaining content after the initial eight-month migration period
• Migrated 1,614 web pages and 245 images while building out a structured library to organize the content
• Created 22 new web forms and applied 450 tags to over 300 web pages
• Valuable training was conducted to improve functional capabilities