American Dreaming - 1990's / Part VIII

The second startup operation that was fortunate enough to be a part of with that organization was a book of business that we captured in covering the municipal employees of the city of New York.

This particular assignment was very similar to the first one in that we had about 90 days to pull of the miracle of building an operating unit that could take on the calls and the claims for the municipal employees (several million covered lives as I recall). The first hurdle was defining all the integration aspects of the systems that would need to be developed to support this particular operation.

The first integration point that was made known to me was that we were partnering with a different organization to actually pay the claims for these medical services. For this we would need to provide for an emulated IBM 3890 client. This wasn’t that big of a deal but we did need to interact rather quickly with the claims payor in this instance to determine all the system requirements that their legacy claim payment process required.

The second integration point was that we were also partnering with yet another information service entity to provide data that would be fed into an already resident system that would take claims payment data and provide some degree of analysis for outcomes studies. It was a very interesting prospect but from a pure telecommunications aspect it provided yet another challenge. This system meant that we had to provide interactive access to an IBM 5250 emulation client for the data to be entered into that system.

We were looking to staff a data entry crew that would be tasked with the triple entry that this book of business seemed to be predicated upon. Once these aspects of the systems requirements were known we began the work of designing the network and the software / hardware requirements that were going to have to be installed in a king hell hurry to meet the deadline of a “go live” in 90 days.

That part I could deal with. Purely technical challenges I had become pretty adept at dealing with and reacting to. The part of this project that I was wholly unprepared for was the human aspects of trying to put up this much technology and infrastructure in a building in the great city of New York.

The biggest hurdle as we would find was in the dealing with the trade unions as this was a “union building” that we were looking to house the operation unit that we were designing and implementing. I have a great deal of respect for the work that union folk do but, given almost unreasonable time constraints this was a challenge.

I had never dealt with a group of folk that I didn’t have any leverage with and were absolutely of the mind set that they were going to do whatever tasks assigned to them at a pace that wasn't going to meet our deadlines. There was no sympathy for business requirements, artificial deadlines or legal obligations. They were going to work in the manner and pace that they were accustomed to.

There was also no hope of being able to circumnavigate these folks and attempt to get some of this work done with resources that we were ready to provide for in this effort. No way… fat chance...this was a union building and as such all of that work had to be provided for by union workers. A lot of begging and pleading ensued. Some concessions were made to accommodate for a lack of some of the anticipated amenities being constructed before our "go live" date.

This project posed a couple of personal challenges for me. I was living in Troy, NY and had organizational supervisory responsibilities within that operating unit and I had begun to take on supervisory responsibilities within our Boston office as well. The project was going to mandate that I spend at least three days a week in NYC. I began a pattern of waking up at 5:00 am to get out of the door by 5:30 to make it to the train station within Rensselaer, NY by 5:55 to arrive at Penn Station in NYC by 7:45 to arrive at the (eventual) office location (four blocks away from the train station) by 8:00 am to do a 10 hour day to take the 7:00 train back to Rensselaer, NY to arrive by 9:45 returning to home by 10:00 pm to then get up the next day and make work by 8:00 in Troy.

I firmly believe anyone can get used to anything given the right motivation. I adapted to this schedule after a couple of weeks and was operating (more or less) at near top proficiency in all of my assigned tasks. It meant no social life but that was certainly not a priority at that point in my life. I maintained this schedule for nearly three months during the construction and formation of this operating unit.

We were successful in our efforts and the operating unit did start-up on time and in spectacular fashion. We dubbed it the miracle on 34th street and were very proud of the effort and the operating unit. I took on the supervisory responsibilities of the staff operating and administering the network within that unit and just added more hours onto my already overbooked professional schedule.

----Jim