Insurance Networking News - September 2010

hood that the solution will meet the business need at the time of completion.

Switching to agile is a learning process. Generally, as leadership and staff become more experienced with agile development methodologies, their positive feelings grow and skepticism declines. But there are challenges along the way. One insurer I spoke with recently was surprised at “the quick adoption rate by business leadership,” while another commented “business analysts (in business units) quickly became advocates.” But they also cautioned against issues of change management, including resistance from IT and the need for following project discipline. There also can be challenges in working with sourcing parties who may be more familiar with traditional waterfall approaches, in keeping momentum going, and in planning and execution.

Another insurer I talked to empha-
sized the value of agile in building
cross-team enthusiasm, noting that
“the business and IT staff both enjoy
the interactive and iterative develop-
ment process,”
Insurers have also seen significant
improvements in business/IT com-
munication. One was surprised by
“How much more quickly problems
bubble to the surface and can be re-
solved more quickly; the strengths
and weaknesses of the team and team
dynamics are exposed much more
quickly.”
Several other insurers mentioned
that they used a modified form of ag-
ile development, and perhaps the
most interesting quote was this one:
“Moving to this methodology
was a shift in how to think for us.

We had to learn a new vocabulary,
look at projects in a different way
and understand that rework was not
a bad thing. We also had to learn
that perfect was the enemy to the
good. Adding functionality in an in-
cremental fashion instead of doing
everything up front is hard to ac-
complish. Prioritization of func-
tions is critical and using object-
oriented analysis/object-oriented
design is much more complex than
we ever imagined, but now that we
have some experience under our
belt, the work is getting done at a
quicker pace, but still not as fast as
before.”
It is important for insurers to real-
ize that agile development is not a
formal design methodology or an ex-
cuse to avoid documentation or proj-
ect/program management discipline.
The take-away from these principles
is on balancing flexibility, regular
communication and collaboration
with the minimum constraints re-
quired—not to impose no con-
straints.

While agile development holds significant promise in terms of business/IT alignment, user enthusiasm and acceptance, it also has a number of challenges:

• Retraining IT and the business in terms of learning a new vocabulary, embracing the need for continuous rework and for close collaboration between IT and the business.

• Project management. Harmoniz-
ing a traditional project management
methodology with the agile develop-
ment process is challenging, but it is
doable and worth the effort. Agile can
be a very effective way to not only
align business needs with develop-
ment, but also reduce some project
and vendor management risk since
code/components are delivered very
early in the project. It allows compa-
nies to address higher-risk elements
up front and/or assess their technol-
ogy partners early in the relation-
ship.

• Reorganization of governance processes. It is important to note that most carriers’ governance processes were not designed to deal with changes (often significant ones) on a real-time basis and will need to be adjusted to do so.

If a team is not comfortable providing honest, regular feedback, and team members are not willing to take responsibility, if proper prioritization and prioritization of tasks does not occur, if a team cannot be dedicated to a project, then carriers will not see the benefits of using agile development. IT and business leadership need to approach the potential benefits and concerns of agile software development techniques in a realistic manner in order to get the most out of them. INN