Fan Wen: overall management of information system projects

[Abstract]

The medical insurance management information system involves medical insurance management departments, fixed settlement points (hospitals, drug stores), and developers. In addition, the policy is changeable, the business is not mature, and the demand changes frequently, development is difficult and risky. During the development of a Medical Insurance Management Information System in a city, I participated in the overall project management as the project owner of the user side. I took targeted measures in the overall project management, strengthened communications between participants, paid attention to changes in user needs and needs, rationally configured project team members, promptly evaluated risks, and successfully controlled risks. These measures balance the interests of all parties, control the scope and progress of the project, ensure the quality of the project, and successfully complete the project.

[Body]

A few years ago, a city developed a medical insurance management information system to implement basic medical insurance for urban workers. As the project owner, I participated in project management, system analysis, and programming.

The functions of this system include fund collection and payment management, management of insurance organizations (employees), management of fixed settlement points, Management of Medical Treatment settlement for insured employees, and management of IC cards, the number of target administrators is 0.3 million, the number of fixed settlement points is 200, and the planned investment is 4 million yuan. The data set is stored in the municipal medical insurance center using the C/S structure, real-time data exchange between a fixed settlement point and the medical insurance center.

Through public bidding, the scope, time, cost, and procurement of the project have been clarified. Therefore, I have focused on the quality, human resources, communication, and risk management of the project, the purpose is to ensure that the functions of the plan are implemented and put into operation on time. In my work, I adopted flexible working methods based on the actual situation and achieved good results.

The system was successfully launched once every 04 years and is currently running well.

I. Strengthened communication management.

This project involves medical insurance centers, insurance units, fixed-point settlement points, system development (integration) providers, and other units. From Requirement Analysis to system design and testing, all parties must participate and coordinate and cooperate, due to the scattered geographical locations of all parties, it is difficult to concentrate frequently or for a long time. Therefore, timely and effective communication between all parties is necessary for project success. To solve this problem, I have taken three measures:

1. Raise everyone's awareness of the role of communication, especially the awareness of the necessity and importance of communication by the main leaders of all parties, so as to provide necessary personnel, funds and time support for communication, this ensures that the communication work is carried out as planned.

2. External Communication to the project team should be conducted in a variety of ways based on actual conditions. On the one hand, it is necessary to institutionalize necessary and important communications in the form of joint meetings, work plans, and summary reports. On the other hand, we adopt flexible and economical communication methods when applicable, for example, telephone communication for minor or simple problems, and opening a meeting for complicated problems, A written meeting notes should be prepared for the important issues that need to be solved in the future and involve a large number of issues. If necessary, the relevant organizations should stamp the official seal for confirmation.

3. conduct proper control over internal communication within the project team to avoid formalism, save time and improve work efficiency while ensuring the effect. It is required that the project team members should record the problems they encounter during their daily work and send them to the users who need to communicate or ask questions by email. You will receive an email before getting off work every day. You will reply directly to questions that can be answered directly. For questions that cannot be answered directly, you only need to discuss with the person who raises the question, discuss and confirm before going to work the next day. For issues that need to be discussed by everyone, they should be discussed at weekly meetings, and temporary meetings should be held on urgent issues. Through the above methods, the effective communication between the parties concerned and the project team is basically implemented, and problems are found and resolved in a timely manner, avoiding serious opposition caused by inconsistent positions of the parties and affecting the project progress, this avoids major quality problems due to poor communication.

2. Reasonably configure personnel.

Plan and configure project team members, rationally divide labor, clarify responsibilities, and ensure that all stages and aspects of the project can be completed as planned. We have assigned the following personnel to the project leader: A technical team leader, responsible for technical difficulties, communication and coordination between groups, and 5 required personnel, converts user requirements into functional and non-functional requirements within the project, prepares project requirement specification documents, and communicates with users to obtain detailed requirements for each iterative integration version. Five designers, responsible for system design of the Requirement Specification; 8 developers to implement design and complete user functions; 1 integrator to compile and compile the entire system, supervise and urge the Team to submit system functions, promptly discover integration problems of various modules, and serve as a link for communication between different groups. Test the version of integration by two testers, discover program defects and designs that do not meet requirements as much as possible; one document organizer is responsible for the integration and unification of documents generated in the team; one maintenance personnel. After system acceptance, maintenance personnel. It is recommended that maintenance personnel enter the project participation project for testing at an early stage to successfully assume the project maintenance responsibilities.

In terms of personnel management, on the one hand, the project team members are required to be relatively stable to ensure the continuity of the development work. On the other hand, the team members are not engaged in the final structure and cannot be competent for the resolute replacement of employees, ensure that the overall work of the project is not affected. Change unqualified personnel through regular and periodic work assessment and review. One requirement analyst deteriorated his relationship with the customer's business staff due to poor work attitude. After the investigation was completed, we immediately moved him out of the project team.

3. conduct risk assessment, weigh progress and quality, and strive for the best balance.

As the project funds have been determined, I will find a balance between the progress and quality, and strive to minimize the risk. Due to the complexity of the medical insurance business and the unstable state policy at that time, the business process was not very well-regulated, and the system requirements were constantly adjusted and improved, which had a certain impact on the project progress. As this project involves the medical treatment of more than insured employees, it has a great impact. by communicating with the user's leaders, we decided not to engage in "image engineering". quality should be prioritized between quality and progress. At the same time, considering that this project adopts the incremental development model and modular design method, I have broken down the project objectives, and the departments involved in business operations are prioritized, ensure that the system runs online at the specified time, and extend other auxiliary functions that do not affect business operations, including medical supervision, statistical analysis, and some reports. In this way, although the overall construction period has been extended, the system is not affected to be launched in a timely manner. This approach also takes care of the interests of all parties and minimizes the overall risk.

4. Emphasize the objectivity of demand changes, strengthen testing, and ensure the integrity, correctness, and efficiency of software functions.

Quality is the life of software. software functions are complete, correct, and efficient, which are an important part of software quality and the most important content for users.

We have adopted software engineering methods and incremental models to focus on changes that meet user needs and needs. Because the country does not have a unified Medical Insurance Business Management Standard Process, in addition, to ensure the balance of income and expenditure of the Medical Insurance Fund, all localities are constantly making policy adjustments according to the operation of the Medical Insurance Fund, the demands of the medical insurance system change frequently. According to this situation, in order to ensure that the software meets the application requirements, we stipulate that during the entire project development process, all the information raised by the user, the investigation is true, and the technical feasibility is demonstrated to be feasible, respond to all requests. At the same time, measures should be taken to avoid repeated and meaningless and unreasonable changes to requirements. Major changes and key changes should be approved by joint meetings of all parties. The participants should sign and take charge of the changes, and the organizations that propose the changes should stamp the official seal. An alternative solution should be proposed for a request change that is unreasonable or technically unavailable and fails to be approved. The solution should be settled after an agreement is reached through consultation with the user organization.

Testing is an important means to ensure software quality, and an effective way for users to intuitively understand software quality and be familiar with software operations. I plan to enhance the test process so that users can participate in the test work from the ground up. We mainly adopt the Black Box Method for Testing and focus our work on preparing test cases. We strictly define test indexes, test environments, test inputs, expected results, and evaluation criteria, try to present different business situations as much as possible. At the same time, we have prepared a fixed-point settlement point for actual operation testing, where manual accounting and computer online accounting are performed simultaneously, and some test cases are interspersed in a planned manner. Through these methods, we found and solved many problems.

After a successful launch, the system passed the acceptance six months later. Review the overall project management process, although there are no major accidents, there are still many problems, mainly including the following three points:

1. software testing is not systematic, and case preparation is still insufficient, ignoring stress testing. After the system is actually running, as the number of insured employees and fixed-point settlement increases, the operation speed decreases rapidly and does not meet the design requirements. Although this problem was solved by upgrading the hardware, additional investment was incurred.

2. The balance between the goals of all parties is insufficient in the demand analysis process. As a result, the settlement subsystem used by fixed settlement points is weak and the provided system access token is not powerful enough, it is inconvenient for internal management of fixed settlement points, and some necessary statistics and query functions are difficult to achieve.

3. Lack of understanding of system requirements differences between developers and operators, and insufficient direct communication between the two, resulting in problems that are very important to operators that developers do not pay attention, there are some contradictions that have adverse effects on the project, especially the overall impression of the project by the user and the leading department.

In conclusion, good project communication and management, reasonable human resource allocation, and balance between progress and quality with risk assessment; emphasize the objectivity of demand changes, and strengthen testing, ensuring software functionality integrity, correctness, and high efficiency is the four main practices in the overall management of a medical insurance management information system project in a city, laying a solid foundation for the success of the project. In the future project overall management work, I will strengthen the systematic and scientific nature of testing, pay attention to the balance of interests of all parties, and continue to deepen communication between all parties, coordinates all parts of the development work and the relationships between various aspects to better complete the project.