From strategy to execution – IT Transformation in the insurance industry

The situation

Our client stands out as a challenger insurance brand in Australia that offers insurance products tailored to meet individual needs. Cprime Elabor8 was engaged by their IT department to design an Operating and Governance model, assist with crafting an IT Strategy, and provide essential Coaching Support. Recognising the need for accelerated progress, the engagement expanded to expedite the IT teams’ transition into cross-functional teams, each aligned with specific insurance products or business lines.

The IT department faced significant hurdles: teams were slow to implement strategic initiatives, resulting in missed revenue and poor customer experience. A misalignment between delivery portfolios and strategic objectives was evident, with various methodologies—Kanban, Scrum, and SAFe®—being adopted in isolation, yielding inconsistent results. The absence of unified delivery models, clear roadmaps, and effective dependency management further obstructed the workflow, necessitating a strategic overhaul.

The challenge

Strategic

The client’s technology group was faced with a number of key strategic challenges — they had to balance the organisation’s strategic goals with the competing needs of a major core system upgrade and replacement. While the IT teams needed an uplift around skills, capacity, and practices to support the platform upgrade, the CIO struggled to gain support for his plans because the rest of the organisation couldn’t see how this would support their strategic goals.

The CIO needed a way to clearly demonstrate how his plans would support the organisation’s immediate needs and ongoing platform upgrade, as well as enhance the IT group’s ability to meet the organisation’s increasingly complex future requirements.

Operating and Governance model

The CIO envisioned moving IT towards a more adaptive model that could harness agility and cross-functional teams to drive simplification and modernisation. At the same time, they aimed to uplift their people’s skills using the new technologies and platforms being developed in-house. Their current operating model and governance systems had not been optimised for this, requiring a holistic redesign approach.

Delivery coaching

While the client had highly talented and capable technical staff in their delivery teams, their efforts were not aligned with the strategic objectives of the business. Work priorities for delivery teams were not consistently set by the business, and Product Managers and Product Owners were not embedded within the teams. Delivery teams frequently jumped straight into technical solutions without spending time in discovery to understand product requirements. There was a lack of clear product roadmaps and priorities, resulting in teams lacking the necessary skills and capabilities to deliver solutions independently, creating dependencies on other teams and impeding the workflow.

The business impact of these challenges included missed revenue in CTP and customer satisfaction issues in the Call Centre and Claims areas. Despite the teams’ considerable efforts on system modernisation initiatives to move away from legacy insurance platforms, there had been no releases to production.

The Process

Strategic

Cprime Elabor8 worked closely with the CIO and his leadership team to clearly articulate the Why, What and How of the IT strategy – 

• Why there was a need for change
• What needed to be done to support the change
• How those changes would be implemented

The why was quite clear — as a digital-first organisation in a highly competitive marketplace, the needs of the business were becoming more complex and required faster execution. Old systems, technologies, and processes were not able to keep up with the pace of change, making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain talent. In order to support the organisation’s overall strategic goals, change was required.

The CIO had a very clear idea of what he needed to do, with several strategic initiatives focused on ways of working and capability uplift that he wanted to start. He had a plan to support the system upgrade. With our guidance, he was able to clearly articulate those plans in a way the business would understand, showing the clear linkages back to the overall business strategy.

Cprime Elabor8 also provided advice and guidance on how those plans would be rolled out. Using their experience with other organisations and their unique IP around governance and ways of working, they helped him develop a realistic high-level plan, clearly linked to strategic outcomes, with clear measures in place to demonstrate success.

Operating and Governance Model

Cprime Elabor8 ran a set of workshops using the Operating Model Design pattern (9 primes) to design the new model. A subsequent coaching engagement was key to translating the outcome into action.

Initially, it was felt that the Governing Model could wait, as the rate of change to implement the new operating model would be quite impactful on the staff. However, as soon as the new model began to be introduced, it became obvious that the existing governing systems were impeding flow and creating tension points. Elabor8 then ran a Governance design workshop using our Pillars and Principles of Governance patterns to redesign the governing systems.

Delivery coaching

Coaching support was provided in three main stages, with Stages 1 and 2 executed in parallel, followed by Stage 3:

1. Coaching CTP Teams to uplift capability and prioritise work to increase CTP revenue.
2. Coaching Small Business Insurance teams to uplift capability and prioritise work to deliver the first production release on the new insurance platform as part of the system modernisation objective.
3. Establishing an Enterprise Coaching team — a collaboration between Cprime Elabor8 and client coaches to spearhead the IT transformation — i.e., transitioning all their IT teams to a consistent delivery model.

Collaboration between the client and Cprime Elabor8 was critical to the outcomes of all three stages to ensure alignment, engagement, and design and rollout of a new IT Operating Model and Governance Model that required Fusions Teams.

The solution

Strategic

Working closely with the CIO, Cprime Elabor8 developed an IT strategy that clearly articulated the Why, What and How of the plan. The strategy was clearly linked to the organisation’s overall strategic goals and contained clear success metrics that would show progress and business outcomes.

Operating and Governance Model
An operating model was designed, taking elements from the two Primes — Mission and Product — that considered the use of cross-functional teams, flow, and the transition of the new technology platforms. This would enable the rollout across both product and operation teams.

The design of the governing systems ensured that the four key issues were addressed:

1. Enable autonomy within the organisation to get the right things done at the right time.
2. Enable agility and adaptiveness in response.
3. Distributed prioritisation to reduce the complexity of the process and the need to centralise.
4. Increase speed to decision-making and delivery.

It also adhered to a key principle that: Decision-making should be pushed downwards as much as possible (with appropriate guide rails/delegation authority provided to ensure escalation of decisions, risk, or contention is required).

Delivery coaching

Cprime Elabor8 took a collaborative approach with the client to lead the IT Team Transition. They designed cross-functional team structures, an IT Team Transition Roadmap, a Transition Checklist, and Ways of Working Guidelines. Pragmatic cross-functional team rollout with coaching support, minimising the impact on key inflight projects. Purposeful capability uplift and establishment of a Product Ownership capability.

Preparations for transitioning into the new cross-functional team structure included role-based consultations, creation of the transition roadmap, and the transition checklist. The Coaching team carried out cross-functional team launches. This was achieved by conducting team launch workshops custom-designed for clients leveraging the Cprime Elabor8 Team launch pattern. Key workshops included Team Formation and Social Contract, Principles and Practices, Team Events, Relative Estimation, and Discovery and Story Mapping.

The results

The IT strategy developed by Cprime Elabor8 was used by the CIO to gain the endorsement of the CEO, Australian, and international board for his path forward. This provided certainty to the technology group and allowed them to begin their strategic initiatives.

The client’s IT, powered by coaching support, was able to rapidly roll out to four cross-functional teams within the first two months of the transformation. The launch followed capability uplifts. Outcome highlights include:

• Four cross-functional teams and eleven squads launched across four product and operational areas.
• Increased business and IT collaboration, including all teams showcasing their work every sprint.
• Product Owner (PO) role within the delivery team and PO Community of Practice (CoP) established.
• Increased staff engagement.
• Renewed focus and alignment on product and business priorities.
• Reduced resolution time and time to market.

Final thoughts

The Cprime Elabor8 coaching engagement helped fast-track the transformation and achieve the outcomes for both client’s IT and business. Their IT teams have adapted well to the cross-functional team-based delivery model and ways of working, which the client can use in future in other areas of the organisation.

A Cprime Elabor8 consultant is engaged to continue building capability and maturity in delivery teams, IT Portfolio, and Product Management.

Ready to elevate your IT capabilities and achieve impactful results? Our Transformation solutions can support your organisation’s journey.

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