Three’s a crowd

Picture the scene: You’re an insurer. A huge claim is received for a house fire which has gutted the property and destroyed everything in its path.

There are legal issues to discuss to ascertain blame, and the claim from your company as well as the project management implications are huge.

There are three claim handlers working on this case. There is an excel spreadsheet in the office system which contains all the details of the claim and the progress with various elements of the project.

One of the claim handlers has a laptop and decides to be proactive and take the spreadsheet home to work on it. They don’t have access to the office files on their laptop so they save a version of the spreadsheet onto a memory stick and take it home. The following morning they attend a meeting with a builder who will be working on the project and discuss detailed quotes for all elements of the claim. They enter these onto the spreadsheet to add to the additional information they put on the night before. As soon as they get into the office they email the revised spreadsheet to their fellow claim handlers.

Prior to their arrival in the office, one of their fellow claim handlers had a conversation with the claimant, who gave important details relating to their policy and circumstances, as well as some details of where she could be contacted whilst on holiday. Upon receipt of their colleagues’ updated spreadsheet, they override the master copy and save it onto the office system. In doing so, all the information from the morning’s call is lost.

Unfortunately this is all too common an occurrence, causing frustration, doom and gloom. Consort from RedKite doesn’t allow this to happen. Projects and files are all stored on a remotely accessible system, and interactions and actions on projects are saved chronologically. Reports are easily created, and colleagues can easily see what the other is working on, as well as make amends to documents without having to have numerous versions. Phew.