What is case management? What isn't it? Explore 10 common and fundamental questions about case management and its uses.
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Case Management in 10 things
Really Good article , just started looking into Pega Case Mangement , also seen G360 Case Management. Will compare and comment on both.
With Best Regards,
Shivaram B.
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Case Management
Your article is a good one, however you are operating in the healthcare space, where the term case management has been associated with clinical/medical utilization operations of the organization. What is your goal with the adoption of the term in non-clinical areas?
Case Management: Broadly Applied
Hi, Jackie,
I'm sorry for the belated reply; I happened to be on vacation all of last week.
You're right that the term "case management," is a term that has many different associations, even within the same industry. The way we use the term "case management" is to refer to any type of work that has a case management feel, regardless of the industry, and regardless of whether or not they actually call it case management.
When I say "any type of work that has a case management feel" what I specifically mean, is work that is attempting to manage multiple different pieces of work in support of a given case. This to us is what defines the "feel" of case management type work. That said, we have many frameworks that support "case management-style" work that naturally use the specific term for their industry. For instance, in healthcare we find that there are many types of work that are "case management type" work, both on the provider and the payer areas. But few of them use the express term "case management" to describe their work. Thus, our healthcare offerings talk in the terms of the work at hand, whether it is care management, claims repair, or claims processing. Or in telecommunications, both order fulfillment, and service case management are case management type work, but we call out each by the names used by the industry. That said, in all of these cases (no pun intended), the underlying functionality that allows users to manage the disparate pieces of work for the "case" is our core case management functionality.
I will say that I am continually surprised by how well the term "case management" resonates with people across industries, even in those areas where they don't use the term to describe their work. They still find that it tends to be a better term to describe the work than others they have tried. Typically what I say to people about case management is really to think of it as [insert your kind of work here] management. Which at times means I am doing [product marketing] management, at others [travel planning] management, and still at others [toddler development] management. And believe it or not, I find that this paradigm is extremetly valuable in thinking about and organizing all of those disparate types of cases under the broader case that is my life :) But then I take case management a lot farther than most people :)
What do you think? Do you think it's unreasonable to try and fit a term that has specific resonance in some areas for a very specific purpose to a broader application?
Thanks for your comment, I look forward to continuing the conversation!
- Emily
Good intro...more is needed
this document addresses only the tip of the iceberg related to Case Management. More information is required related to the structuring of primary cases and subordinate case(s) when building the work to be completed.
Many technical resources are still creating disintegrated, linear process flows/actions that do not take into account the concepts outlines in the document.
All in all, this is a good starting point.
Richard
Case Management 201.. and Beyond
Thanks for your comment. I apologize for not responding earlier--I was out on vacation for all of last week.
I couldn't agree with you more that this document only addresses the tip of the iceberg--and I will be continuing to provide content that dives below the surface to explore the other 99%. I've got a backlog of topics that I'm working on, and will add case-sub-case structure to the list. I touched a little on it in this blog post discussing the distinction between cases and processes. If there are other areas you'd like expanded on, please let me know!
I don't know if your question is more about how technically to create these structures within Pega, or how one should decide that something is a sub-case or simply add onto the primary case--so I'll answer both :) Technically creating the case/sub-case structure is done within the case designer, which was introduced with 6.1 SP2. It is a very business friendly tool, and allows the designer to add a sub-case type as easily as he or she would a folder within a folder in Windows. It also allows him or her to re-use other case types as sub-cases in the same easy fashion. As to the question of whether or not one chooses to make something a sub-case or part of the main case, that is more a question of art. But as a rule of them, I say that a sub-case should be something that's big enough that you could reasonably think to handle as a top-level case, but which has discreet bounds that make it part of a case. Below is a very quotidian example of a case structure--though there are probably some more sub-cases under even the third-level sub-cases in some of these.
- Emily's Life
- Work
- Product strategy
- Product Marketing
- Child-rearing
- Potty training
- Pre-school
- Personal Interactions
- Personal development
- Reading
- Travel
- Cooking
- Skills/proficiency development
- Social engagement
As to your comment about technical resources not quite yet embracing the concepts, I'm not at all surprised. It is actually a pretty big step to make that shift to thinking hierarchically, from the more linear process thinking. It is particularly difficult, because the linear must also be grafted onto the hierachical in order to really make it useful. This is why I harp on the importance of understanding and appreciating the distinction between a case and a process, and how they interact. Once people get that distinction, they really seem to "get it" and it's like pandora's box is opened for them in terms of the things they can do with this approach.
Let me also say, if I can be of help with this etiher personally, or by providing or pointing you to content please let me know. It is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Thanks, and I look forward to continuing the conversation!
- Emily
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