Full circle

As I've mentioned before, I have worked for a large insurance company now for 11 1/2 years, on the claims side of things. About eight years ago, the large company bought a smaller company. (Well, one in particular - they're always selling and buying small companies within the larger corporate umbrella.) Very shortly afterwards, we were informed that all west coast claims handling operations were going to go under the management of this smaller company. There were all sorts of rumors going around to explain why it felt like the tail was wagging the dog, but whatever the reasoning was, it was something of a hostile takeover.

After all the layoffs and reorganization, we then shifted over to their computer system. It was DOS based and archaic and we hated it. The rollout seven years ago was sudden and chaotic, and the training provided wasn't particularly helpful when it came to actually working the claims. It was a very unhappy time and the whole transition appeared to me to be not well thought out.

A couple years ago the parent company announced that they wanted to work towards having a seamless claims operation, including all companies using the same system. That was easier said than done because there were many challenges in getting all of the platforms involved to talk to each other. The west coast was to pilot the roll out of the new system. Surprise! The new system is the same one we used seven years ago (with some updates, of course). I had actually predicted this would come about, but I really thought it would happen sooner than it did.

So the rollout was scheduled to happen on Friday, April 18th. Fine, since that's not a particularly busy day - and I don't work on Fridays. But as it turned out, there were set backs, and instead, the rollout happened the following Monday. Now why they couldn't just push it back another day or two so it wouldn't happen on the busiest day of the week, I just don't understand. When I left work for the week last Tuesday, we still had no idea what the new workflow was going to be. So Monday I came in to work and had to find out just how I was supposed to do my job that day. Although it was a familiar system to me, it was still a chaotic rollout. Then, to top it off, the system crashed at 10:30am due to server overload. Really? No one anticipated how many of us would be on the system? Lovely. So then we had nearly three hours that we could do next to nothing (except go to lunch, and stand around and complain). Just what I love. Knowing the work is piling up and having no way to do it. Tuesday was a slight improvement, the system only slowed down for about 30 mintues, but no crashes. However, we seemed to be experiencing a huge disconnect when it comes to management all being on the same page as to how they want things handled. No one seemed to be in agreement, which put me in the middle. I love my job, I love my job.

I'm so thankful that I'm only part time, and that I can get all my hours in in two days instead of having to spread it out over five! Hopefully they'll have worked out most of the bugs by Monday. It truly boggles my mind how a large corporation can do these half baked operations. It's times like these that keep me remembering why being a mom is so much more satisfying than trying to climb the corporate ladder and getting all caught up in the politics involved!