www.thoughtworks.com

Business Critical Insurance Broker Management Solution ThoughtWorks helped an innovative insurance industry solutions

provider to develop a highly complex broker management application

– agencyPlus. Built using Agile best practices across a distributed

65-person team, agencyPlus is an incredibly functionally rich, flexible

and scalable insurance broker solution.

The Client Insurecom believes that general insurance broking is being held back by the dominance of software

solutions that are built on ageing technology. Most broker systems are based on architectures years

out of date, making it progressively harder for brokers to keep pace with the market. As the industry

consolidates, the lack of scalable products for the new class of large, highly-distributed corporate

intermediaries has opened up a significant opportunity.

Insurecom’s goal is to become the market leader in developing and delivering truly innovative, total

broker solutions for the UK and North American general insurance intermediary market. They want to

allow a forward-thinking broker to realise their full potential while lowering their cost of doing business

and allowing brokers to adapt rapidly to changing market needs. Insurecom is based in Bermuda, with

principal offices in the UK and Canada.

The Situation Insurecom was at risk of losing its 17% market share with its existing product offering in the UK. They

were constrained by the limitations of their old platform and were limited by the lack of responsiveness to

market needs from their existing software, which they distribute under a license arrangement. In addition,

while Insurecom employs a large number of the industry’s leading software engineers, they did not have

the capacity in-house to develop a new product of this size and complexity.

The Challenge

Insurecom wanted to build a brand new insurance broking platform that would offer a total solution to

the growing sector of large, consolidating intermediaries who own multiple brokers over multiple offices.

The new platform needed to offer end-to-end large corporate broker functionality, be flexible and

scalable, while benefiting from a robust Windows platform and cutting-edge technology. It had to offer

brokers maximum efficiency gains and offer intuitive functionality to enable all departments to work within

a single solution. The solution also had to offer a simple and effective method of integrating underwriting

business, and allow simple yet high performance e-commerce facilities.

The Benefits

• Insurecom got an incredibly

functionally rich, technically

complex application to market

in a time that many thought was

impossible.

• Total transparency in

development process ensured

close collaboration and kept

the client constantly updated

on progress.

• Changes in requirements

were easily accommodated by

using the most innovative Agile

best practices.

• ThoughtWorks approach to

offshore development projects

allowed the business and the

development teams to drive

constant innovation throughout

the project.

• Automating build and

deployment and testing

provided helped maximize

efficiency and quality.

www.thoughtworks.com

Business Critical Insurance Broking Solution The primary challenge with building the product was the need

to combine an offshore model in a highly collaborative way with

Insurecom’s experienced broker solutions team and in-house

developers. What’s more, Insurecom had no tolerance for failure on

the project; essentially developing a replacement solution for their

largest clients and prospects, as well as future-proofing the core of

their business in a highly competitive landscape.

Insurecom selected ThoughtWorks as a reliable partner to help get

the product to market as quickly as possible.

Working Towards A Solution

Insurecom and ThoughtWorks worked very closely together

throughout the project which consisted of the following phases:

Inception

A combined Insurecom and ThoughtWorks team held a four-week

project inception in the UK and built a shared understanding of the

agencyPlus vision and agreed detailed requirements. The team

constructed a project roadmap and development plan in these first

four weeks, as well as identifying and mitigating areas of technical

risk by undertaking “spikes” to glean a deeper understanding

of the situation and possible solutions. ThoughtWorks business

analysts stayed on-site at Insurecom for a further six weeks to

finalize requirements, while the initial development phase began in

Bangalore.

Development

The ThoughtWorks’ development team in India broke the project

into a number of small iterations, tackling the most important and

highest-risk areas of the system first. At the end of every week,

the functionality that had been developed was “showcased” by

videoconference to the Insurecom team. The Insurecom team

reviewed whether the functionality was in line with their expectations

and re-prioritized the functionality of the next iteration as needed.

A great deal of focus was applied to making sure that

communication from the business to the development team and

across the development team of 40 people worked as smoothly as

possible. Full use of WebEx and Instant Messenger was made and

regular visits of ThoughtWorks and Insurecom staff between India

and the UK helped to ensure the highest levels of communication.

Support and Evolution

After the first release of agencyPlus, work continued on new

features for subsequent releases. Getting the first release out was

critical and the feedback from customers and Insurecom team

helped define the priorities for further releases, ensuring that the

latest developments reflected the latest needs of customers.

A dedicated ThoughtWorks support team resolved production

issues as they occurred and regular (need-based) support releases

were provided while the major releases were in-progress.

ThoughtWorks’ automated build and deployment pipeline practices

helped the team to manage several versions of the software

simultaneously. This helped ensure stability for Insurecom and its

customers while evolving the product.

Client Benefits A key feature of ThoughtWorks’ offshore software development

process is the high levels of transparency into progress. This project

was a massive undertaking for Insurecom and each week, a project

review meeting was held to discuss how quickly requirements were

being delivered. Early on in the project, it was realized that the

complexity of some of the requirements had been under estimated

and this threatened to push the project off-track. Instead of finding

this out too late to address it, detailed weekly information about

how quickly the project was delivering against how quickly the team

had expected to deliver helped make it relatively straightforward

“Not only did we get a fantastic product to market in a short time that embraces all the functionality our clients need, we are adding unique functionality that reflect the latest changes in a rapidly evolving marketplace.”

Phillip Walter, CEO, Insurecom

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Business Critical Insurance Broking Solution to revisit the project roadmap and review certain requirements and

priorities. Changes in scope and prioritization made sure that the

project stayed on track and delivered against Insurecom’s business

objectives.

ThoughtWorks’ approach allows the easy accommodation of

change to suit changes in business priorities. Initially agencyPlus

was being developed for small brokers. However, Insurecom found

great interest in the product towards the end of the delivery cycle

from medium and large brokers as well, introducing more functional

and technical requirements. The product roadmap was easily

changed to deliver the new requirements in subsequent releases as

priorities evolved.

The Future

Released in April 2007, agencyPlus is unrivalled in the market in

terms of breadth and depth, and has received excellent feedback

from customers and staff alike.

Insurecom is highly innovative and ideas-driven and is constantly

searching for new ways to deliver value to its clients. During the

development process, Insurecom adopted ThoughtWorks’ Agile

practices and philosophy. Insurecom and ThoughtWorks are now

working together on new and innovative features for agencyPlus

that will help maximize the competitiveness of Insurecom’s clients.

Client Executive Quote Phillip Walter, CEO of Insurecom gives his perspective: “Industry

experts explained to us that it was not feasible to build a system

with this breadth and depth of functionality from the ground up.

We are competing with products that have taken years to develop,

many of them over 20 years. Not only did we get a fantastic product

to market in a short time that embraces all the functionality our

clients need, we are adding unique functionality that reflects the

latest changes in a rapidly evolving marketplace. This includes

automated regulator compliance, automated business processes,

transactions on-line with customers and partners, and new

innovative products to maintain competitive advantage. We are now

making the largest sales in the Company’s history. ThoughtWorks

has been an instrumental partner in the success of agencyPlus

and helped bring our vision for an exciting and innovative product

to market. I will whole-heartedly recommend the ThoughtWorks’

approach to anyone.”

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© 2008 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved.