Insurers Finding Multiple Ways To Accelerate The Product Development Process
The Buck Stops Here
Traditionally, an actuary or IT professional has acted as the project manager whenever an insurer is implementing a new product. But Beach says that problems can arise when those individuals are distracted by their "day jobs" and cannot be fully dedicated to the project. Professional project managers can alleviate some of those problems. Beach points to a study conducted by the Society of Actuaries that shows that inserting a professional project manager into the product development process could reduce overall development times by 20 percent to 40 percent.
"A project manager's sole responsibility is to oversee the product development process," Beach says. "They make sure that each task is assigned and that tasks are being completed on time. They anticipate bottlenecks, work to alleviate resource constraints and make sure that the decision makers are available at the appropriate times."
Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Financial ($4.7 billion in total revenue) assigns dedicated managers for all new projects, according to Mike D'Ippolito, associate vice president, individual investment group (IIG) systems, for Nationwide. Within the IIG there are six dedicated project managers. "They front-face the business in terms of all the IT work that needs to get done [on a given project]," D'Ippolito says. "There could be 20 areas or more involved in the effort, but one consistent project manager front-faces all those areas to the business."
Nationwide also has sought to improve communication between the business and IT in a further effort to improve speed to market. Each account team has an IT worker who is directly involved in most ongoing business conversations. "We have IT people that are pretty much assigned to various areas of the business to learn all they can about how that part of the business operates and to offer IT solutions to them," explains D'Ippolito. "They can come back into IT and really help us stay abreast of what's going on in the business firm."
Parsippany, N.J.-based John Johnsen, a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting, says that early collaboration is key to speeding up the development process. "Getting the IT team involved very early on -- discussing the products and concepts and how the systems are able to handle it or not handle it -- is very important," he asserts. "If you design the product and then give it to the IT people and say, 'Do this,' it's too late for an IT person to reply, 'Well, this is going to be difficult to do.'"
"To deliver projects on a timely basis, you need to do the difficult things first, and you need to involve the IT group and make sure the integration component, the complex parts of a product, are done," adds Duck Creek's Roller, who says involving the IT team early in the product development life cycle is a way to tackle difficult integration issues up front, before they stop the process in its tracks. It's a strategy that he believes has emerged as a best practice, even for companies that have made strong speed-to-market technology investments.
"Often, when you've created the right types of tools, you can do an incredible job of simplifying the rating, the underwriting, the workflow and those pieces into something that's manageable, in a way that can be delivered rapidly. The challenges will always remain in those areas [of integration] that are going to vary from carrier to carrier and from group to group," Roller says. "The right way to approach those is always to deal with them up front and in a uniform way."
By integrating with the various parts of the business, Nationwide's IT department has distanced itself from the role of order taker. "We really wanted to avoid the 'throwing it over the fence' phenomenon and instead be a consultative partner, up front," the carrier's D'Ippolito says. "That's paying huge dividends -- probably more than anything else we've done."
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