One of the keys to being competitive in the insurance industry is to be responsive to the changing marketplace and regulatory and economic environments. With a deep reliance on data, systems, and applications to automate and streamline processes, IT must be nimble enough to enable and facilitate the responsiveness of the business.
The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has seen that the traditional Waterfall model to deliver new products, features, and functionality is characterized by:
- Inflexibility: Scope and requirements are locked in early.
- Unresponsiveness: Changing requirements is costly due to the burden of change management.
- Inaccurate estimates: That’s because estimates are provided when the least is known about the project, causing it to go through the change management process.
- Long cycle times/feedback loops: Once requirements are handed off to IT, there is a prolonged period before anything is delivered for business testing.
- Reliance on documentation: Regardless of how specifically requirements are documented, they are open to interpretation, which results in changes and re-work.
- Fluctuating business requirements: These include features and functionality that varies in value from must-have to optional.
Based on these experiences, Guardian was eager to improve delivery. Through a series of experiments, Guardian was able to prove that the Scrum framework combined with selected practices from eXtreme Programming (XP) improved quality, accelerated delivery, and reduced the cost of delivery.
The output was the creation of a best practice called the Guardian Scrum Done Right framework that provides a consistent and repeatable process.
The Scrum Done Right framework is a best practice guide that enables teams to launch successful Scrum projects based on the Guardian context. The framework is the collection of the shared organizational learning over the period of time that Scrum has been properly used at Guardian.
Results
The results have been positive for those teams following the Scrum Done Right framework:
- Quality increased from 77 percent on Waterfall projects to 88 percent for Scrum projects.
- Automated regression testing built and run for each increment delivered results with less business testing and improved quality due to detection of unintended impacts of new code.
- Speed-to-deliver functionality was significantly faster, dropping from nine days with Waterfall to 1.5 days with Scrum.
- Cost to deliver decreased from $1,850 with Waterfall to $1,450 with Scrum.
- The close collaboration between the business and IT results in the development of more appropriate solutions that balance benefits against costs.
- Solutions emerge over time and are responsive to changes in the regulatory and competitive markets.
- Business leaders can easily trade off different aspects of scope to ensure the highest value features are delivered.
- Teams can be re-purposed to new projects because the Scrum Done Right framework provides a consistent base for delivery.
- Business leaders avoid “gold plating” solutions.
- Delivery teams avoid over-engineering solutions to accommodate potential future needs the business may have.
- Estimates are refined over time and negotiated to improve the overall ROI of the project.
- Small experiments can be run to help the business determine what products, features, and functionality customers truly want and what will be profitable before all the development is completed.
