Novant Health

Type: Process Improvement / Re-egineering

Industry: Healthcare

Duration: 6 months [2012-2013]

Role: Project Lead

(contracted through BrandActive, a

3rd party consultancy firm)

Situation

Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Novant Health is an integrated, not-for-profit healthcare system spread geographically over four states and serving more than 4 million patients annually. The launch of their updated brand identity, aimed to bring together 13 hospitals, 355 clinics, nearly 50 general care delivery centers, and 25,000 employees into a master branded architecture. While Novant Health had started to deliver on a unifying vision, the system was represented by over 400 local brands, leaving no way for patients to connect the pieces and really understand what the brand stands for.

Challenge

In most situations, we partner with the Client's Marketing group to assist in the brand roll-out. Normally the Marketing group manages their own area of expertise (brand launch, marketing and communications material conversion, etc.) with our input; and engage our firm to mainly focus on managing the branding initiative across the rest of the organization. In this case, as a secondary priority, we did provide assistance and expertise to Novant's internal PMO organization that was tasked with leading the brand change across the system.

However, as our primary task, Novant's Marketing leadership asked us to help them manage both their own workload for the rebranding, and to help re-engineer and reorganize their 40 person Marketing Group post-brand launch. They sought to be more integrated as a holistic health system, and less regionally or individual hospital focused in their marketing efforts post brand-launch. The challenge was to manage the existing marketing team structure and on-going marketing efforts; support the brand change planning and implementation effort; and help determine the new department structure post-brand launch.

Results

Within 8 weeks, working closely with the Client's marketing team and leadership and their key agency partners, we took a four-pronged approach.

First was mapping Current State roles and responsibilities and quantifying workload by category of activity to understand how time was being spent.

Second was determining the marketing tasks, branded assets and resourcing available to meet brand launch plan requirements and build that project plan. Over the next 4 months we provided on-going project management, reporting and budget monitoring to ensure these efforts were on time and budget.

Third was to develop and finalize the Marketing budget submission to the PMO organization who were consolidating all rebranding budget requests.

And fourth was to help map out the Future State marketing team organization with adjusted resourcing, roles and responsibilities post-brand launch. Best practices in change management were leveraged to ensure that the marketing team, as a whole, had input into the process and were invested in the final reorganization plan.

The transition from current state; through brand launch planning and implementation; and the new post-launch organization structure was clearly understood and allowed the team to focus on the task as hand without the stress and distraction of what changes were coming.

The new Brand and Marketing reorganization were launched with great acclaim and acceptance by all stakeholders in April, 2013.