Other Video Conferencing Ideas

The company that acquired our company is based in Spain and the system was developed in Spain by their software affiliate. The system is being used currently in 17 countries, including one small office in Florida. None of the offices that are using the system have the claims volume that we have in Massachusetts. I think I mentioned before, my company writes auto insurance for 1 out of every 3 cars in Massachusetts. That is a lot of business. We issue 3000 checks a day, for instance. The country that has the next largest volume is in Venezuela and there has been some talk of the people on the project team going to Venezuela to see the system in action.
In the meantime, our call center is going to begin to take new claims for the Florida office on the new system. The system is called TronWeb. People have visited the Florida office and we have some training documentation that has been produced by non-training personnel. But, we wanted to see the system in action. So, this past Friday I facilitated a Webex session with the Florida office. There were about 15 people involved in the session from Massachusetts and three from Florida. We had the Florida people “share their desktop” so that the people in Massachusetts could see how they process a claim. It was such a learning experience. It was the first opportunity we had to see the system in action and it made so much more sense once we got it out of the “lab” setting and into a production setting.
The lead business analyst and I were talking after the Webex meeting and starting thinking that maybe between Webex and video conferencing we could bring the Venezuela system to Massachusetts. Instead of having to travel to Venezuela, we could see the system in action through a similar Webex experience. We could also bring in some of the Arizona team members in on the act as well.
All of a sudden, we have seen what video conferencing really can do for the project. The possibilities are limitless and it is really exciting. I wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of travelling to Venezuela and now I think we can get so much more accomplished. The time zone in Venezuela is the same as Massachusetts and pretty soon Arizona will only be a two hour time difference. We should be able to get all the people we need into the video conference and it should really help us move the project along.
Finally, I am excited that my next course at Drexel will be Project Management. I really think it will help me as I work on the TronWeb project.