Customer profile

For 150, years, the General Medical Council (GMC) has been regulating the medical profession, giving to 250,000 UK Doctors the license to practice. The organisation embarked on a 4-year programme in 2006 to take their IT applications towards an enterprise model, with:

• Siebel acting as core front end
• LiveLink supporting complex document management
• Oracle Financials taking care of financial transactions (each Doctor pays a yearly licence fee to the GMC)

Business context

Besides some of the more classic questions related to the implementation of a Siebel system in a public-sector organisation, the GMC offered some highly interesting specifics:

• The specifics of people roles were such that, even for a small user base, no course could be applied to more than 6 people average
• The ability to deliver Siebel smoothly had been heavily challenged during the rollout of the release deployed prior to XCIT’s involvement, with 2 training teams having been disposed of before the actual launch
• The data and business model required by the GMC implied a strong customisation of Siebel, with numerous choices having to be made to maintain a balance between the need to stick to core Siebel - with the hope of leveraging the platform’s functionality- and the desire to customise
• The culture of the organisation, not unlike that of the healthcare industry it was involved in, had users be accustomed to receiving extremely bespoke systems, with little or no effort to adapt asked to users
• The project strictly adhered to Prince 2 methodology, and formality was paramount in the delivery pace

What we did

XCIT consultants spent 9 months at the GMC. Patiently, we built the relationship with the project team, the stakeholders, the operating and senior business. The relationship and cooperative spirit created an extremely fruitful atmosphere, so much so that business users made the time to get involved at all critical stages, in particular testing and User Acceptance Test. 24 variations of the core course were delivered to 170 people in various combinations.

After less than two weeks of roll-out, floorwalkers were asked to come back to their desk. That’s how smooth things went for this on-schedule within-budget project.

Outcome

A flagship roll-out to remember, that XCIT prides itself of having been involved in. Just the way it should be!