Case Study: Healthfirst achieves faster, safer releases and improved release visibility with Plutora

How Value Stream Management Helped Healthfirst Overcome the Challenges in Changing Through the COVID19 Crisis

Healthfirst, a New York–based health insurer serving about 1.5 million members, faced acute pressure during the COVID-19 crisis to move services and staff to remote channels and accelerate digital delivery. Although agile practices were widely adopted, teams operated at different maturity levels and lacked end-to-end visibility into release risk, experienced scope creep, and needed to maintain governance while transitioning to DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.

By implementing Value Stream Management with Plutora—integrating VersionOne, HP ALM and ServiceNow—Healthfirst gained a 50,000-foot view of release pipelines, real-time reporting and release orchestration. The platform enabled data-driven conversations, enforced scope locks, reduced scope creep and monthly release risk, and sped delivery (notably a mobile app released every three weeks, often two months earlier than calendar-based releases), while providing the governance and insights to support broader DevOps and CI/CD adoption.

Healthfirst

Tony Mongiovi

Director of Release Management