Wall Street Commercial Insurance System Development Crisis

Situation – Competitive Advantage at Risk Due to Application Delays:

A major Wall Street commercial lines insurance company outsourced a $17 Million program to develop software to automate their underwriting process.  Their underwriting business rules were considered to be a strategic source of competitive advantage and the system was required to automate their business rules.  The project was significantly delayed in the design phase because the business rules and workflow for the underwriting process were distributed in many organizations and loosely defined.  Closure of the design phase failed several times and the design delays represented a tripling of the cost and timeframe for software development.

Solution – Re-architected Application and Re-Organized Development Teams:

Members of Capto were engaged to complete the design phase, shorten the timeframes for development and reduce overall project cost overruns.  Capto representatives re-architected the system to include a rules engine that would allow flexible definition and modification of business rules.  This enabled the design to proceed with a parallel track to define the business rules, independent of the development effort.  The project team was re-organized and the work plan re-partitioned to accomplish shorter delivery dates.  In addition, a project sponsor was identified and empowered to facilitate decisions across the disparate underwriting organizations and a new governance process was implemented to ensure that sponsors and stakeholders were immediately involved in decisions that would affect delivery dates, staffing, prioritization or other project outcomes.

The project delays, staffing and cost overruns were cut by two thirds, saving the client over $10 Million and delivering critical components of the system on time.