Insurance companies today are complex businesses. With separate products for home, auto, small business, and many others, it’s very difficult to get a single view on what’s happening operationally. Add in over 48,000 agents with their own needs, and the challenge only intensifies. One company we recently spoke to was determined to address this issue. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation.
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
We needed to understand how each strategy aligned with outcomes. This objective required governance and visibility at both product and investment level. Different approaches to product management, project delivery, and PMO oversight were a challenge and left executives without a clear picture of what was happening and what decisions they had to make.
We found ourselves facing:
- Limited visibility of product and portfolio investments
- Little alignment between strategy and business outcomes
- A lack of standardized processes and reporting
- The near impossibility of rolling up data into one consolidated report that could be delivered to stakeholders and executives
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We needed a single investment planning solution that would not only allow us to centralize reporting and metrics, but also provide a standard platform for all projects. These features would standardize governance and make it much easier to align strategies and investments. Critically, the solution would also support more effective decision making, providing the confidence that leaders needed to act quickly and decisively.
What did you do, and how did it help?
We selected and implemented Clarity from Broadcom, allowing performance reporting to be driven directly from the platform. Our EPMO is already managing 75% of the portfolio through Clarity as our new standard, with the remaining projects in the process of migrating to the solution. The savings in producing reports alone is a significant contribution, and that’s not even the biggest gain.
For us, the ability to give executives information they can trust allows us to reach levels of performance that we couldn’t have dreamed of before. Leaders see the data they want in the format they want, and they believe what they are seeing. That provides them with the confidence that the work being done is contributing to the strategy and improves governance when needed.
How is this driving your success?
Our EPMO resources are no longer producing reports, allowing them to add value to the business by helping to solve business challenges. We understand much earlier when investments are not generating the required returns, allowing us to make adjustments sooner. That prevents us from wasting money and reduces our opportunity costs, driving a greater overall portfolio return.
Additionally, our ideation has improved with these greater insights into what is and isn’t working. We now have more confidence in our ability to deliver innovative, profitable solutions across all areas of the business, and it will only increase further as we migrate the rest of our portfolio onto the Clarity platform.
