Pratheeksha is a Project Manager with Optum Technology, the information technology division of the UnitedHealth Group. She describes her position as making sure the team she manages always has the customer experience in mind while developing new technologies. With a background in Industrial Engineering, Pratheeksha explains the lifecycle of a project, from origination to data visualization and finally to implementation.
Transcript
My name is Pratiksha, and I am a project manager at Optum Technology. So Optum Technology is part of United Health Group. United Health Care is the health insurance side, and then Optum Tech is the healthcare technology. So they do basically everything under the sun related to software engineering, and pertaining to healthcare. So, my role is really to make sure that my team's focus is on work that we do to help people live healthier lives, so keeping things customer-oriented and just making sure that we're putting the customer first in trying to develop technology and meaningful services that help them live healthier, rather than making healthcare cumbersome for them. So, I am on a process improvement team, so what we do is kind of critically look at certain applications on the employer and individual side of United Health Care. Recently, I was looking at three applications. They were doing close to 20,000 hours of OM, which is operations and maintenance work a year. So our goal was to look at their whole problem ticket process, and their lowest priority to get processed to reduce some of that 20,000 hours down, because these were just hours spent on tickets like, "How do I update my software?" "How do I create a new profile?" Things like that, that really shouldn't be something that you're contacting a help desk for. It should just be something that we have resources for customers to be able to do. So the main tools that I'm using are pretty much Excel and Visio to build process maps and just find a way to visualize what people are telling me they do. But then after that, tracking is through Excel, and they we use something called Tableau, but that's really more related to our "service now" and incident ticket submissions. We can pull reports through there and then visualize them on a heat map or some sort of bar graph to show our managers and champions for projects exactly who is meeting what goals and stuff like that. So my manager and her director expect everyone to be online or in the office between about 9:00AM and 2:00PM. Other than that, you can kind of choose if 7:00-3:00 works better for you, or 8:00-4:00, whatever, as long as you're getting 40 hours a week and you're completing all your projects and all your work.
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