Customer Success

"By simulating applications and visually validating requirements prior to development we are prescribing to the adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With a clear, concise set of requirements in place before development we are able to significantly reduce rework costs as well as begin other post-development activities such as testing and training in parallel."

– Phil Lanzafame, Product Manager of Internet Products, Sentara

Background
Sentara Healthcare is a not-for-profit health partner in Virginia and North Carolina that is one of the most progressive and integrated health care organizations in the nation; providing services to more than two million Hampton Roads residents. Sentara provides nearly $100 million in uncompensated care to Hampton Roads residents annually.

Challenge
Sentara recently embarked on a large-scale project to add complex functionality to its online employee portal, automating the migration of manual, paper-based HR processes to the portal in order to make them available to its 15,000+ employees dispersed across 80 locations. Sentara business analysts relied on text-based tools to define application requirements for the new portal functionality but quickly realized the text-based process was inadequate to easily and cost effectively validate the project's complex requirements with large, distributed groups of business and IT stakeholders.

Result
Sentara turned to iRise and application simulation to meet the challenge of efficiently engaging stakeholders in defining the new portal functionality and associated business processes. Interacting with the fully functional iRise simulation rather than text documents, stakeholders quickly and easily identified missing system requirements, eliminated unnecessary functionality, discussed related process and policy issues and gained consensus. The final simulation was presented to IT as a stable reference specification for an application that had been validated to meet the needs of the business. By using iRise to simulate and visually validate business requirements, Sentara was able to accelerate requirements cycle time by 50%, reduce project costs, drive user adoption and deliver its signature superior service.