Major insurance group goes agile with Mindera
How a leading insurance business deployed a modern, scalable, AI-driven underwriting capability.
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A working proof of concept was delivered in just 3 months
The challenge
Finding it increasingly difficult to offer customised insurance propositions through digital channels, an insurance company with operations worldwide appointed software development partner Mindera to facilitate a major transformation project. The multi-million pound transformation programme set out to create a modern, scalable underwriting capability with model-driven risk selection and pricing, blending human judgement with data science.
The project demanded significant technology replacement and operational change in terms of people and process, and crucially, there was a desire to adopt a different, more rapid approach to delivering the programme. At the same time, the insurance company was becoming increasingly concerned about the speed and cost of technology change in general across its European operations. It was time to look at things differently, and Mindera was brought in to help due to our experience in developing agile ways of working.
The solution
Through Mindera’s guidance, the transformation programme was set up to embrace agile principles and practices from the very start. Initially, we advised and led the insurer through an initial discovery phase, applying an innovative approach to validating the business case. This involved forming a small vanguard team operating in a lab-style environment (the team was coined ‘m-Lab’, short for Momentum Lab) and consisting of a cross-section of key stakeholders from multiple business areas, as well as business architects, change management leaders, technology and operations personnel.
With everyone co-located and working intensively together in a designated ‘team room’, a great deal was achieved extremely quickly – a classic example of ‘people over process’. A working proof of concept was designed and built in just three months, a timescale that would have been unimaginable under the insurance company’s conventional delivery process.
Building on this early success, an agile methodology was developed for breaking down the programme into small increments. This ensured budget drawdown was linked with tangible outcomes rather than deploying excessive resources too early and potentially over-burning on cost. The programme plan was crafted to tackle areas of high uncertainty early, to reduce risk and build confidence, especially in the eyes of the programme steering group.
Leading on from the agile practices pioneered in m-Lab and then scaled up for the North Star programme as a whole, Mindera designed and led an agile transformation programme across the technology and operations division of the insurer’s European operation, securing executive-level sponsorship. An agile Centre of Enablement (CoE) was formed to act as the fulcrum for change and contained a cross-section of change agents from the company’s IT and Ops teams, as well as agile experts from Mindera. The CoE tackled:
- Building an 18-month transformation roadmap
- Assessing and modifying governance and control frameworks
- Introduced new tooling for agile planning and reporting
- Provided internal training (multiple cohorts, 100+ people)
- Hands-on coaching of multiple agile ‘pilot’ projects
Mindera also provided leadership in influencing lean management and delivery for a multi-million pound claims portfolio. This focused on the formation of an agile delivery team to test out ideas and become an exemplar in delivery, along with a review and redefinition of how technology demand was prioritised and agreed at the portfolio level.
The results
The project was established as an agile programme for the global insurer, transforming incremental delivery and introducing new levels of transparency. This achieved a step-change in understanding and adoption of agile methodologies as the new norm for IT delivery for the company’s European operations.
As a result, numerous benefits have been realised, including:
- Enhanced customer insight and understanding
- Insight-driven pricing and risk selection
- Machine-powered operations and processing
- Enablement through data, analytics and machine learning
- Production innovation for solution differentiation
- Adaptable tech-savvy organisation
A global insurer’s road to agile with Mindera
- Agile training courses delivered across UK technology and operations teams (100+ people)
- Agile champions group formed to accelerate adoption
- Agile coaches provided to boot-strap multiple pilot projects and overcome organisational barriers
Deploy agile ways of working today with Mindera. Contact us now!