From Frontline to Back-Office, Insurance Firms Connect Value with Clarity

The insurance industry has been around for a long time and tends to be perceived as traditional and conservative. Insurance companies, however, are often at the forefront of emerging approaches to optimize their business. We spoke to representatives of several companies about their approaches to technology and its overall business impact.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

We’re in a competitive business. We need to optimize how we operate to remain competitive. We’ve been on an Agile transformation journey for several years — and that has been going well — but we wanted to do more.

For us, that meant leaning into value streams and value stream management (VSM). We needed to do that in a way the entire organization could adapt and embrace with minimal disruption.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

We stripped everything down to the most fundamental level. We worked with our teams to understand how we were creating value. That process gave us a better understanding of real costs and benefits, which in turn meant challenging the way we had been doing things in the past.

It also meant better defining our real value streams – bringing people together to document exactly what we did. Sometimes that was nothing more than diagrams on paper, but it still worked as a way to engage people.

What do you do, and how does it help?

We’ve selected Broadcom’s VSM solution that combines Clarity and Rally. With Broadcom we can deliver true ValueOps, connecting everything we do from strategic priority setting through funding, delivery, and benefits realization. Critically, everything also ties back to value:

• Executives see the value that is being delivered at an enterprise level
• Business leads see the value that they are driving through their value streams
• Project managers and teams see the value that they are driving directly

We can roadmap our strategies, convert plans into investments and drive those investments directly to our work teams with VSM. We then capture and track progress, identify and address any variances, and confirm that we are achieving the results that we expected. It gives us a level of confidence in our performance that has never existed before.

How is this driving your success?

It’s providing us with a common purpose. VSM concepts provide visibility into how value is being created, and Broadcom’s VSM solution shows how and where we are driving that value. We can provide everyone with insight into that value in a way that makes sense for them.

The result is improved understanding, which drives productivity and enables better decisions. It also aligns everyone in the organization from frontline team member to executive, ensuring everyone pulls in the same direction and maintains our competitive advantage.