A growing number of insurers are adopting or expanding their use of Agile, but these kinds of practice transformations can be difficult to sustain over long periods. One way insurers have found success is by creating dedicated groups to provide training, support, and a common vision.
Amerisure, winner of a 2020 Impact Award in the IT Practices category, was recognized for its Agile practice group, which it created to foster the company’s transition to Agile methodology. The group developed a common enterprise Agile framework and trained dozens of resources in less than a year. That led to Amerisure executing seven major projects and reducing delivery time for minimum viable products by 50%.
Insurers are transitioning to Agile methodology to realize improvements in software quality and business outcomes as well as to reduce cost, risk, and re-work. Novarica’s research on insurer IT budgets and projects indicates that many insurers have plans to expand their use of Agile in 2021.
Those transitions can be challenging. Changing corporate practices takes time, and IT leaders need to manage awareness and buy-in across the organization. Agile adoption at insurers can run aground on cultural resistance, lack of support, decentralization, or even lacking a common definition of “Agile.”
Amerisure’s case study shows that a key element in successful practice transformation is executive investment. The practice group project was sponsored by the CEO and chief admin officer, and the group itself was composed of 12 leaders from across the company. The team targeted senior leaders for its first training sessions to create top-down buy-in.
Agile transformations can be sustained processes, and insurers encounter roadblocks at various stages of adoption. Earlier this year, we created the Novarica Agile Maturity Model for Insurers to serve as a rubric to evaluate organizational models and capabilities, as well as to identify challenges particular to each phase of maturity.
In July, Novarica announced the winners of the ninth annual Novarica Research Council Impact Awards. These awards recognize insurance technology projects that demonstrate real business impact and are selected by insurer CIO members of Novarica’s Research Council.
Several Impact Award winners, including Amerisure’s CIO Amjed Al-Zoubi, will join Rob McIsaac and me on Tuesday, September 29 for our insurer client Virtual Town Hall. Case studies for all winners and 20 other IT projects considered for the Impact Awards are collected in this year’s Insurance Technology Case Study Compendium, and more than 100 case studies from the last five years are available in Novarica’s research library.
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