What was the business context for this particular project?

“The New Zealand Police Association (NZPA) runs a health insurance product for its 37,000 members and for forty years had been processing tens of thousands of paper claims into an antiquated policy administration system. The system was bespoke and becoming increasingly difficult to support and near impossible to improve. The NZPA required a new policy administration system that could provide members with an online solution and do away with the paper claim process.

The underlying core data was housed within an on-premises dynamics 365 system within a complex system of tables with little understanding of how these table interacted or fed through to the user interface. Individual claim data was grouped against a policy owner, which is an approach that is divorced from industry norms. We required the core data be maintained and managed according to industry norms and linked against the individual claim instance. Therefore, we required a significant amount of preexisting data linkages to be split apart, mapped to a new solution and new data fields, while maintaining the high priority of the data integrity at a granular and global level.”

What perceived challenges existed at the start of the project?

"The data we endeavoured to migrate is extremely sensitive and subject to regulatory oversight. Maintaining the integrity of data is paramount to also maintaining reputational risk with the membership.

We were aware of the need to cleanse the data held in the legacy system as this solution required workarounds for day-to-day processes which then created anomalies within the data. Certain fields were free form text and extremely difficult to standardise. Due to the importance of data integrity and security, we hired Steve early in the project to advise and perform the data migration process. We also engaged Steve to advise and inform our approach on system architecture, which aided deeper understanding of migration set against new integrated solutions.

As we built the new system, we also learnt how to improve the potential outcome. This work did change the scope of the data migration and made the transfer of data more difficult.

For these reasons, we approached migration with integrity, flexibility, and security as paramount. Steve helped us navigate these core principles and shaped the migration process to a continuous learning model. In partnership with the business, Steve conducted multiple migration iterations to fail fast, remove the noise, and focus on narrowing outstanding issues for resolution. This approach resulted in a successful migration of complex data from a problematic environment into a stable one.”

Any lessons learnt from the project?

"With any complex migration we could have started phases of the approach earlier and invested more funds into the project. However, there is always a balance to strike to manage the risk and the value of the investment.”