The Challenge
The Maryland Department of Health sought to modernize licensing and regulatory processes across more than 15 departments and regulatory groups serving a wide range of professions and services.
At the time of our engagement, most participating departments relied heavily on paper applications and cash or money-order payments to process new licenses and renewals. Moving these services online required understanding each department’s existing processes and translating its needs into digital workflows.
The challenge was to develop a coordinated modernization plan that accounted for department-specific requirements, the capabilities of our product, necessary enhancements, and the effort required for implementation and ongoing support.
My Role
As Senior Project Manager, I owned current-state discovery, assessed how our product could support departmental use cases, and worked with Product to identify necessary enhancements.
I partnered with state leadership to prioritize departmental needs and developed the modernization roadmap. I also worked with internal leadership to write and compile the proposal, connecting discovery findings and solution requirements to the proposed scope and estimated program cost.
How I Approached It
Established the current-state baseline.
I reviewed documentation provided by the state and met with leadership and subject-matter experts from every participating department. During these sessions, stakeholders walked me through their existing processes and described their intended future state.
This discovery established the requirements behind the broader goal of digitization, including how departments handled license applications, renewals, and associated payments.
Mapped departmental needs to product capabilities.
The proposed solution was Enovational’s proprietary low-code/no-code form-building platform. Although the company also implemented Salesforce, this proposal centered on its own product, requiring a clear assessment of how its existing and emerging capabilities aligned with departmental needs.
I researched which product features best supported each department’s use cases and assessed how they could translate existing licensing processes into digital workflows. I worked with Product to distinguish requirements that could be addressed through configuration from those requiring enhancements or modifications.
This assessment connected departmental expectations to a proposed solution while identifying gaps that required additional product work. I worked with Product to clarify those gaps and incorporate the necessary development effort into the proposed scope, roadmap, and cost estimate. This helped ensure that the proposal accounted for both implementation of existing capabilities and development needed to support the broader modernization effort.
Developed priorities with state leadership.
I worked with state leadership to prioritize participating departments’ needs and translate those priorities into a coordinated roadmap.
The roadmap brought the individual discovery findings together into a proposed path for the broader modernization effort, linking departmental requirements with product configuration, enhancement, and implementation needs.
Connected scope to the full delivery cost.
I developed the roadmap and worked with leadership to compile the proposal. The estimate accounted for product configuration, enhancements and modifications, licensing, consulting, implementation, and support.
Including these components established the proposed program’s cost beyond the initial software deployment and reflected the effort required to deliver and sustain the modernization.
Results
I developed a modernization roadmap and contributed to a proposal with an estimated program cost of just over $100M, covering more than 15 participating departments and regulatory groups.
The proposed scope connected departmental discovery findings to product capabilities, required enhancements, leadership priorities, and anticipated delivery and support costs. It provided a basis for evaluating the investment required to move predominantly paper-based licensing processes toward digital services.
The roadmap and proposal established the foundation for a modernization initiative I was positioned to lead through delivery. Enovational’s subsequent closure and bankruptcy ended our involvement before the initiative could advance.
What I Learned
A shared modernization objective does not eliminate department-specific needs. Detailed discovery and leadership prioritization were essential to turning separate licensing workflows into a coordinated proposal.
Planning around an emerging product also requires careful separation of existing capabilities, configuration needs, and functionality that still requires development. Those distinctions directly affect scope, cost, and delivery expectations.