Development measured in days
A growing backlog, with a single story taking days to research and write before engineering could even begin.
Customer Story · Healthcare / PBMOptumRx writes engineering-ready ServiceNow stories in minutes, not days.
Shavone Sears' business analysts are the bridge between internal users and engineering. Researching instance context and writing a single story used to take days. With Echelon, that work now takes minutes.
Meet OptumRx
Company
OptumRxPharmacy benefit management (PBM) business within UnitedHealth Group
The team
Shavone's teamBusiness analysts who gather needs from internal users and translate them into epics, stories, and requirements
Scale
5,400active internal users supported~600 assignment groups
The instance
11 yearsof a highly customized ServiceNow instance
The results
What OptumRx got from Echelon.
Days → mins
To produce a story engineering-ready, not a rough draft
5K+
Engineering hours saved previously spent supporting analysts
1K+
Hours saved annually in exec reporting alone
The challenge
Stories took days to write, and business
needs often changed in that time.
At OptumRx, producing one user story meant reading documentation, researching a highly customized instance, and often consulting an engineer. But by the time that became a buildable story, new tickets were piling up. Missed sprints and rework followed as fresh requests changed inflight work, cascading across dozens of teams into a backlog only more labor could clear.
Constant demand for scarce skills
Progress kept depending on more ServiceNow-skilled people, and on interrupting senior engineers for instance context.
Hard to govern standards
Story quality varied by author, making it difficult to hold consistent standards across a decade-old, instance-wide setup.
“
Getting a story built used to mean going and bothering my solution architect, or the engineering lead.
Shavone SearsSenior Capability Manager, OptumRx
The solution
Echelon writes stories in minutes. Analysts review.
When an analyst receives a request, Echelon takes that input and produces a full story in a fraction of the time. It expedites the time-intensive, error-prone work of sourcing documentation and instance context, without removing the human judgment that makes a story good.
Sources docs & context
Pulls the relevant ServiceNow documentation and OptumRx instance context automatically, no engineer required.
Writes the story
Drafts a full, engineering-ready story in minutes, grounded in OptumRx standards and how the instance actually works.
Reviewed by an analyst
A business analyst reviews and approves the output, keeping human judgment on every story that ships.
Handling vague business requests.
“It leads you through that experience so you get the best output possible.”
Shavone SearsSenior Capability Manager, OptumRx
Some tickets are vague. Before Echelon, that surfaced later as rework. Now Echelon walks users through plain-language, outcome-focused questions, so the input is accurate and fully understood up front.
Before
- A ticket comes in and the analyst reads platform documentation.
- Vague tickets mean going back and forth with the business team to clarify intent.
- They research the instance and consult an engineer to fill gaps.
- The story is hand-written, and often reworked as context drifts.
After
- Echelon clarifies the request by asking questions, reading docs, & pulling instance context.
- It drafts an engineering-ready story in minutes.
- A business analyst reviews it, and it's right first time.
Critical workflows, accelerated
Three workflows that went from days to minutes.
The same translation work that once stalled delivery now moves at the pace of a conversation, across story creation, executive reporting, and instance questions.
Story creation
Vague requests clarified, instance and doc research automated, and a story drafted in minutes for analyst review.
Instance Q&A
Ask how something is built and get an answer with cited sources, instead of queuing for a senior architect.
Executive reporting
A 10-page tracking deck generated each morning, in the same format every time, in under 10 minutes.
Executive reporting
Half a day of reporting, now a few minutes.
Sprint and status reporting used to mean manually compiling data, re-adjusting for changing task times, and building slides from scratch, roughly half a day of work.
Now the format is locked in once. Echelon sources the data and builds the deck, so a 10-page tracking deck is generated each morning in the same format, in under 10 minutes.
“It's saved me 100 hours in six weeks.”
This morning's deck
Generated 10 / 10 pages
9 minBuild time this run
100+Hours saved in 6 weeks
Deck sections
Sprint velocityStory points by team
GeneratedBacklog burndownOpen vs. closed
GeneratedBlockers & risksFlagged this week
FormattedExec summaryOne-word prompt in
ReviewingKey takeaways
The bottleneck was never team size.
It's the translation layer
The real bottleneck in ServiceNow delivery often isn't team size or engineering capacity. It's the layer between business intent and technical specs, where context gets lost and rework begins.
Business owners can spec
The people closest to the business are best positioned to produce detailed requirements. What held them back was tooling to output that in a format complete for developers.
Standardization beats speed
Output that's consistent and complete on the first pass reduces clarification cycles far more than simply working faster does.
Put Echelon on your instance.
Start with a scoping call. We'll learn your environment, your conventions, and where you want to be, then show you what context-aware AI looks like on your ServiceNow.