Category – Agile

Agile Projects

 

Insurance Company Cuts Cycle Time by 20% and Saves Nearly $5 Million Using Haplen Agile Project Management Practices

 

Project durations have been cut by 20%, resulting in a net savings of roughly $5 million. The percentage of projects completed on schedule and under budget has grown by 40%. As a result, management expanded the scope of the effort to
integrate agile techniques throughout the firm.

 

 

Company

A US-based Fortune 100 company providing insurance products and services to clients in North America.

Challenge

With a billion-dollar project portfolio containing hundreds of projects, the client needed to reduce time-to-market in order to respond to competitive demands and its expanding product line. Over a three-year period, they established aggressive goals to lower average project length by around 50% and boost internal customer satisfaction by 25%. At the time, the client’s project management environment was inflexible, relying nearly entirely
on traditional phase-based delivery timelines with a heavy development process.

Solution

The client implemented the Scrum framework and other agile product development methodologies in the hope of benefiting from the reduced project durations promised by an iterative methodology. As part of this program, the company planned to bring radically new management approaches to a historically trained project management community, with a focus on early and frequent delivery of value to end-users.

During the early stages of this project, PM Solutions became a vital member of an internal group that provided agile coaching to teams using agile development approaches, as well as training adapted to their specific context.

PM Solutions also guided the client’s project management organization through the various modifications that these new techniques demanded of an organization that had been trained in traditional methods.

Results

After 18 months of mentoring and coaching, a number of significant results were realized:

  • Average project duration (cycle time) was reduced by approximately 20%, for a net savings of nearly $5 million
  • Customer satisfaction improved nearly 30% (exceeding the goal of 25%), 18 months ahead of projections
  • Project startup duration decreased from an average of 10 weeks to 3 weeks
  • Time-to-first-solution implementation decreased from an average of 20 weeks to 7 weeks
  • 90% of projects adopting agile practices and techniques now deliver the desired value to end-users on-time and within initial budgets – by contrast, with traditional approaches, only 50% of projects delivered desired value on-time and within initial budgets.

Approximately 15% of the client’s project portfolio now uses some type of agile project management. The client has developed strategic goals that formalize the ambition to “go agile” across the business as a result of demonstrated success employing a combination of agile project management and development approaches. As a result, management has demanded that the percentage of projects
adopting agile approaches be doubled.

PM Solutions continues to assist in the leadership of coaching and mentoring initiatives aimed at further ingraining agile concepts into the company’s business processes.