Situation—Application Delays Put Competitive Advantage at Risk

A major Wall Street commercial insurance company outsourced a $17 million program to automate their underwriting process, a process that was one of their strategic competitive advantages. The project, however, foundered in the design phase because the business rules and workflow for the underwriting process were loosely defined and distributed across several business units. The firm had failed on multiple occasions to close out the design phase, and the delays resulted in a tripling of the cost and timeframe for the project. The company engaged Capto to complete the design phase, shorten the timeframes for development, and reduce overall project cost.

Solution—Rearchitected Application and Development Teams

The Capto team rearchitected the system to include a rules engine that would allow flexible definition and modification of business rules, allowing the firm to proceed with the definition of its business rules on a parallel track with the technical development effort. We also recommended a reorganization of the project team and a repartition of the work plan to allow for shorter delivery dates.

Most importantly, Capto worked with the firm to identify and empower a project sponsor who could facilitate decisions across the disparate underwriting organizations and put a new governance process into place that ensured all the stakeholders were 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 our client over $10 million while incrementally delivering critical features of the system on time.