Executive summary

Business Challenge

After a national health benefits organization acquired a 900-person non-profit organization in its field, their Vice President and General Manager were given twelve months to achieve four demanding goals:

• Transition the non-profit to a for-profit business with cultural integration.
• Increase operating income by $14 million annually.
• Decrease the cost of care from 18% of total revenue to 10%.
• Increase Great Place to Work (GPTW) score from 50 to 85.

Sophia Network was hired to drive a successful cultural transformation and achieve business results using design thinking methodologies. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation. It is anchored in understanding stakeholders’ needs, deploying rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas to develop products, services, processes, and organizations.

Business Results

Increased Profitability: The two organizations were successfully integrated and were able to transition to breakthrough levels of profitability. As a result of our implementation process, the company’s operating income increased by $54 million. By decreasing the cost of care from 18% to 10%, the new company achieved $12 million in savings.

Cultural Transformation: Most companies benefit from review of their company culture and this client was no different. What made an assessment of company culture imperative was the merging of a non-profit and a for-profit company into one aligned organization, both internally and externally. Through our implementation process, cultural integration was successful and the company’s Great Place to Work score increased 70%.

Summary

Dramatic improvements like these required operational and cultural transformation in the organization. Achieving demanding goals in a rapidly growing company meant overcoming business-as-usual attitudes, risk aversion, and inadequate infrastructure and data tracking. It also required greater focus on a process-oriented culture, brand ambassador development, and engagement of the workforce and stakeholders—with visible, sustainable goals that can be celebrated top-down, bottom-up, and across the company.

This case study illustrates how organizational transformation was achieved using a well-defined and results-focused design thinking process to embrace aggressive business and growth goals—and how our process led to exciting breakthrough performance. To address the client’s biggest challenges, we focused on both quantitative and qualitative outcomes, then applied a proven process for transforming the organization’s vision into action.

Process Overview

How Sophia Network implementation achieves results.

A Process for Productivity

The Sophia Network implementation process begins with a formative stage that identifies specific and relevant roles of each team member. We use a results-focused model that includes RACI, which appropriately assigns who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This model, when used correctly, eliminates pain points and confusion around various roles and accountabilities that, if not established clearly upfront, often result in projects not getting off the ground, stalling, or failing. This formative and often overlooked stage is what makes RACI a catalyst for success.

Most of us have witnessed large team meetings that require juggling calendar conflicts and where precious time is lost in scheduling all participants. The RACI method allows us to manage time more effectively with a core team that assigns the responsibility and accountability to those persons actually doing the work. The core team then reaches out to consultants and decision-makers to get feedback. Simply put, RACI can shorten the cycle of projects, which is critically important to fast-growing companies.   

Implementation Strategy

Most project initiative implementation processes include about 10% creating and 90% implementing. Using the Granger Network Implementation Process, we spend 30% creating, 30% engaging, 30% implementing, and 10% completing. This is not a linear process, instead it is an iterative and organic process. E.g., We might be creating while engaging or creating and implementing. Our proven and unique process delivers in four connected projects phases.

“Project”: An individual or collaborative initiative that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

1.   CREATE: Team alignment

We plan a project kick off where we create and set our vision for the project, map out our stakeholders and identify each of their concerns. Together, we look closely at what is missing and align on what needs to happen for the project to be a celebrated success.

2.   ENGAGE: Project stakeholders

We create a visual representation of the project, and a custom pitch for each stakeholder to engage their interest and experience and bring them onboard. We listen carefully to their concerns, then adapt and adjust based their feedback.

3.   IMPLEMENT: From vision to reality

We imagine the success of the project and what we will achieve. Then we work backwards to set milestones with measurable results. We stand up communications systems and structures that we can implement to complete the project successfully. We meet and align to move the project forward as a team.  

4.   COMPLETE: Celebrate/Exit/Turnover

“We believe in celebrating successes – large and small. Rather than waiting for the final achievement of a goal, teams celebrated the completion of phases and the attainment of milestones. Acknowledgement and celebration accelerated team building.

Too often when projects end, no one really celebrates them or if they are not turned over, they may die a slow death.  Our process ensures that we celebrate every project, and we make sure that if it is handed off that it is done successfully. To avoid a collapse or loss of momentum, we plan our project exit by establishing communications and reporting structures for every team.

PROJECT OUTCOMES

We coach project teams to address both the “tangibles”—systems, structures, metrics—and the “intangibles”—passion, creativity, design.

Project Team	Goal	Result
Cost of quality care	Reduce annual increase of 18%	Reduced increase to 10.5% (saving $12 million)
Service quality	A “member touch point” quality rating of 96 out of 100 (in 12 months)	97 out of 100 (in 2 months)
Workplace satisfaction	Improve from 50 to 66 out of 100 on national Great Places to Work Survey	Scored 70
Community relations	Become a leader in the local healthcare community by launching a successful Healthcare Forum	Launched a successful Healthcare Forum attended by 300 community members that is now ongoing
Project management and workflow prioritization	Create viable process for project management and workflow prioritization (in 12 months)	Built project management “toolbox” (in 5 months)

Our team alignment process revealed that the 900-person non-profit entity had internal structures that were less rigorous than the for-profit company. This led to an important review that allowed the leadership and stakeholders to efficiently bring the value of the non-profit organization into a rapidly growing for-profit company.

Value Delivered

The Sophia Network team was able to address barriers in the organization, increase goal awareness, embed design thinking principles, and allow natural leaders to emerge from the frontlines of the workforce. As a result, project teams met their strategic business goals, embraced accountability, operated from a team mindset, expressed passion in their work, delighted their customers, and were responsible for significant profit.

In both the short and long term, project teams helped create a resilient, agile, focused, fun culture, and leadership was able to express a vision of the new company with more active engagement of their workforce who continue to feel more productive and valued.

Customers too have been the beneficiaries of these changes. The company reports that customers now consistently communicate their positive brand experience and satisfaction through their feedback channels.

Quotes from Stakeholders

“I never expected there would be such a cultural revolution in just 6 months. I was planning on leaving the company – really glad I stayed!”

“This methodology has affected everything we do and how we think! “

“It’s exciting coming to work now. This would not have happened without Granger Network team guiding us through this implementation process.” 

“As a customer, I had problems for years with the company service reps but that is gone. I can tell it’s a different company now.” We have used this process with several clients across various industries and varying in size from $20M to $500M and speed of growth. While each client requires something different given their unique industry and challenges; the core principles have endured across all companies, size, industry and speed of growth.