Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, College of Management Pair Up for Exec Programs

The leadership team at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina had the same thought. Ian Gordon, who joined BCBSNC in 2007 as senior vice president of commercial and government operations, determined that his 100-member service operations management team needed to do things with greater efficiency to meet more aggressive performance goals.

Lynn Duffy, vice president of leadership and organizational development for BCBSNC, brought this need to the Executive Programs staff at NC State’s College of Management. “We were impressed by NC State’s willingness to create a customized curriculum specifically targeting our organization’s unique needs in the area of operations management.”

Duffy worked with Bozarth and Russell Thomas, director of the college’s Executive Programs office, to develop and deliver a custom program – the Service Delivery Leadership Program – that would train about 100 of their managers, directors and vice presidents to better design, plan and run service operations.

“The company’s service operations managers had performance targets that they needed to meet, particularly in the areas of claims, customer service, appeals and software solutions,” Bozarth said. “Their members want a certain level of service, and the managers have to make it happen.”

The six-day custom program spanned six weeks and covered the latest techniques in defining and documenting service processes, analyzing and managing service capacity and performance, and forecasting and managing demand. Managers also learned how to build simulation models of their actual processes. The program was taught to three groups of participants this spring and summer at the College of Management’s Research Triangle Park facility.

“This was the one of the best things to hit the operations area of the company in a number of years,” Gordon said. “We identified enough cost savings opportunities in the first round to pay for the whole program.”

Gordon praised Bozarth’s skills as a teacher for making the quick return on investment possible, saying: “He had great rapport with the people in the program, was great at content delivery, and showed how the fundamental tools are important building blocks for getting the job done.”

Bozarth used practical examples to demystify the academic terminology. “When covering queueing theory,” he said, “we talked about the fact that customers arrive at varying times, with varying needs and varying demands for services. A lot of this relates to having a gut feeling about things, but through the class, the participants were able to express this intuition within a body of theory and more scientific, formal terms.”

Bozarth also had the participants work in cross-functional teams to tackle real business problems and present real solutions.
“This approach is at the heart of why this program was so successful,” Gordon said.

Among objectives achieved in the program were;

• Increasing the management team’s knowledge of the latest in services process management techniques and tools
• Developing new lines of communications and relationships through a more common service operations vocabulary

• Informing and exposing the management team to more effective ways of working with and across various operations and non-operations functions, including customer and government operations, healthcare, information technology, and sales and marketing.

Services management is one area of focus for the custom programs available through the NC State College of Management’s Executive Programs Office. Other custom topics include innovation management, supply chain management, leadership and managerial effectiveness, and enterprise risk management. These courses are also available to graduate students as part of the MBA program in the college’s Jenkins Graduate School of Management.

The NC State College of Management offers graduate and undergraduate degree programs in accounting, business management and economics, and custom executive programs.

About BCBSNC:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina is a leader in delivering innovative health care products, services and information to more than 3.7 million members, including approximately 900,000 served on behalf of other Blue Plans. For 75 years, the company has served its customers by offering health insurance at a competitive price and has served the people of North Carolina through support of community organizations, programs and events that promote good health. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Access BCBSNC online