Case Study: Accelerating Innovation with Agile Delivery for a National Insurer

Client: A Leading National Insurance Company in New Zealand
Service: Agile Software Development, Stakeholder Engagement, and Product Delivery

The Challenge:

A prominent national insurance company in New Zealand faced the challenge of rapidly responding to evolving market demands, customer expectations, and regulatory changes. Their traditional, waterfall-based software development approach was proving too slow and inflexible, leading to:

• Delayed Time-to-Market: Long development cycles meant new features and products were launched too late.
• Misalignment: Gaps often emerged between business needs and technical delivery due to infrequent communication and rigid requirements.
• Inefficient Prioritisation: Difficulty in adapting to changing priorities, leading to wasted effort on features that were no longer critical.
• Limited User Feedback: Insufficient opportunities for end-user input until late in the development cycle, resulting in rework.
• The client sought a more dynamic and collaborative approach to software development that would enhance agility, improve alignment, and accelerate the delivery of high-value digital solutions.

Our Role:

Engaged to introduce and embed agile software development methodologies within the client’s technology and business units. Our role encompassed establishing agile frameworks, facilitating cross-functional collaboration, driving continuous delivery, and ensuring robust stakeholder engagement throughout the product lifecycle.

Our Approach:

Our methodology focused on implementing a full-spectrum agile transformation, fostering a culture of continuous delivery and collaboration:

Enhanced Stakeholder Engagement:

• Established clear channels for continuous stakeholder engagement, moving away from infrequent, formal reviews to regular, iterative feedback loops.
• Key business stakeholders were actively involved in Sprint Reviews, providing direct feedback on working software increments, ensuring solutions remained aligned with evolving business needs.

Bridging Business and Technical Teams:

• A critical focus was on fostering a seamless link between business and technical teams. We facilitated joint workshops and daily collaboration sessions, breaking down traditional silos.
• Product Owners, drawn from the business, were empowered to make real-time prioritisation decisions, ensuring technical efforts directly supported strategic business objectives.

Collaborative Epic and User Story Writing:

• Guided teams in breaking down large strategic initiatives into manageable Epics and then into detailed, actionable User Stories.
• Workshops were conducted to ensure user stories were well-defined, testable, and understood by both business and development teams, fostering a shared understanding of requirements.

Structured Sprint Planning & Execution:

• Facilitated effective Sprint Planning sessions, where development teams committed to delivering specific, high-value user stories within short, fixed-length sprints (typically 2-3 weeks).
• Daily Scrums ensured transparency on progress and immediate resolution of impediments, maintaining momentum.

Strategic Release Planning:

• Beyond individual sprints, we collaborated with the client to develop a strategic Release Plan, outlining the sequence of feature deliveries and their alignment with market opportunities and business goals.
• This provided a roadmap for incremental value delivery to customers.

Dynamic Function Prioritisation & Backlog Management:

• Robust backlog management practices, ensuring a continuously refined and prioritised list of features and enhancements.
• Product Owners were trained to dynamically prioritise functions based on business value, technical feasibility, and market feedback, allowing for rapid adaptation to changing circumstances.

Integrated User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Planning & Implementation:

• UAT was integrated throughout the development lifecycle, not just at the end. We developed UAT plans that involved business users testing incremental features at the end of each sprint.
• This early and continuous feedback loop drastically reduced rework, improved software quality, and built confidence in the delivered solutions.

Key Outcomes & Impact:

Through this comprehensive agile transformation, [Your Consultancy Name] enabled the national insurance company to achieve significant improvements in its software development and product delivery capabilities:

• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Reduced average feature delivery time by 40%, allowing the client to launch new functionality, customer experiences, products and services more rapidly.
• Enhanced Business-IT Alignment: Improved collaboration led to a reduction in requirements-related rework, ensuring delivered solutions precisely met business needs.
• Increased Flexibility & Responsiveness: The agile framework allowed the client to pivot quickly in response to market shifts or regulatory changes, maintaining a competitive edge.
• Higher Quality Software: Continuous testing and early user feedback resulted in more robust and user-friendly applications.
• Empowered & Engaged Teams: Development teams gained greater autonomy and a clearer understanding of business value, leading to increased morale and productivity.