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Agile at Scale
Our approach to establishing an agile organization on a large scale allows our customers to:
- Improve employee engagement
- Foster innovation and autonomy of operational teams
- Adapt to change
- Attract and retain the best talent thanks to a common vision
Success Stories: Supporting a General Insurance Company in their Digital Transformation; from ‘Legacy to Agile’
"Tracking at 110% of estimated financial benefits"
"IT delivery has increased by 30% using the agile approach"
Where we started
Our client is one of the largest general insurance companies in Ireland. It employs approximately 1,500 people and has a million customers. It is part of a larger group that has over 80 million customers in 70 countries worldwide.
Our client embarked on a digital transformation programme. This involved moving from a legacy delivery approach to an ‘agile’ approach and the introduction of product management to drive agile technology delivery.
The challenges
The leadership team felt the pace of change within the organisation was too slow to react to customer demand and its competitors.
New initiatives took many months or even years to deliver impacts; visibility on return on investment was difficult to measure and there was an ever-increasing gap between the needs of the business and its capacity to deliver. To address these issues, our client embarked on a digital transformation programme. This involved moving from a legacy delivery approach to an ‘agile’ approach and the introduction of product management to drive agile technology delivery.
What we did
Working closely with senior executives, our team worked across the organisation to create an ‘agile enterprise’. We stopped projects that would not deliver benefits and re-allocated capacity to high-impact work. We reshaped the prioritisation and selection of business initiatives to align with company strategy. IT was transitioned from a waterfall to an agile development team delivering on-demand and synchronizing on a quarterly cadence.
We worked alongside our client and took direct responsibility for the first high-impact project, which focused on the Claims Fraud Team and delivered benefits months ahead of expectations, using lean design and agile delivery principles. Finally, we worked with the organisation to hire, re-train and coach staff to support the new ways of working.
The outcomes
The project was completed on time and within budget and is currently tracking at 110% of estimated financial benefits. IT delivery has increased by 15% using the agile approach. The agile management team established to deliver the first high-impact project has served as a template for the creation of further agile teams delivering benefits to a wider transformation programme. A key benefit of this project was the demonstration of how product management and agile delivery could improve benefit realisation across the company.