Agile development has entered the mainstream of development approaches. However, many insurers still struggle with how to transition from a traditional development methodology and achieve success with agile.

MassMutual assistant vice president Christine Gendron and Liam Tuohey, the company's systems director, shared the success of the insurer's agile development process in a strategic initiative around the customer experience during a session at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum.

Although Mass Mutual's project is massive in scope, involving the consolidation of several core customer servicing applications into a single customer experience servicing platform (CESP), Gendron and Tuohey will highlight how starting small with agile helped MassMutual achieve big results.

"We were able to scale agile development from a pilot project involving 13 people to a model with over 100 people involved and eight to 10 teams running at any one time," says Gendron.

The session explored the specific strategies Mass Mutual used, including scaling to an enterprise scrum model, creating training processes needed to instantiate an agile mindset among developer staff, and developing a reusable "readiness model."

Reusability has been key to MassMutual's success with the CESP project, and Gendron and Tuohey will highlight how reusable SOA services incorporating ACORD standards have been essential components of its agile development approach.

"There is no point-to-point integration in the CESP initiative, which was a big change in our way of thinking," Gendron explains. "Even though it might feel like point-to-point is the quickest way to achieve your integration results, you pay for it in the long run with reduced flexibility and increased costs. Our enterprise integration strategy around ACORD-standard SOA services and using the ACORD standard data model has been directly tied to achieving our business goals."

Overcoming Obstacles

No massive systems undertaking comes without its challenges, particularly when it also involves a change in development methodology, as MassMutual's has. Gendron and Tuohey detailed obstacles the agile team faced and how they were managed, including the challenge of convincing business that agile was the right strategy in which to invest.

"Agile had limited use in MassMutual before our project, so we needed to prove to the business that it was the right method to adopt for the CESP project," Gendron says. "We took a risk, but we showed that it would work in the pilot project and by demonstrating that it would deliver business value right out of the gates."

Unlike development methods such as waterfall, where one stage of development has to be completed before moving on to the next, agile allows for incremental rollout of system functionality. This iterative development provides a continuous feedback loop between business and IT that keeps the project on track.

"We've been able to put new features in front of customer service reps every few weeks so they can see exactly what they are getting and whether or not it meets their business needs. We then incorporate that input into a real-time release," says Tuohey.

In addition to detailing the impacts agile has had on the CESP project, Gendron and Tuohey will also discuss the impact CESP has had on business at MassMutual.

Next Steps

To date, MassMutual has deployed the CESP solution for its call center, and a producer self-service component is in the process of being rolled out. The two remaining pieces of the project are direct customer self-service and complex transaction processing.

"Our main objective in every rollout of the CESP project is to create an experience that delights the customer," Gendron says. "For MassMutual, agile methodology and service development were new and challenging. The same is true at many companies across the industry. We hope that people can learn from the challenges we addressed and the processes we've put in place to achieve success with agile in their own organizations."

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Agile Technology as an Agent of Change

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