Agile development has entered the mainstream of developmentapproaches. However, many insurers still struggle with how totransition from a traditional development methodology and achievesuccess with agile.

MassMutual assistant vice president Christine Gendron and LiamTuohey, the company's systems director, shared the success of theinsurer's agile development process in a strategic initiativearound the customer experience during a session at the ACORD LOMAInsurance Systems Forum.

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

"We were able to scale agile development from a pilot projectinvolving 13 people to a model with over 100 people involved andeight 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 trainingprocesses needed to instantiate an agile mindset among developerstaff, and developing a reusable "readiness model."

Reusability has been key to MassMutual's success with the CESPproject, and Gendron and Tuohey will highlight how reusable SOAservices incorporating ACORD standards have been essentialcomponents 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 wayto achieve your integration results, you pay for it in the long runwith reduced flexibility and increased costs. Our enterpriseintegration strategy around ACORD-standard SOA services and usingthe ACORD standard data model has been directly tied to achievingour business goals."

Overcoming Obstacles

No massive systems undertaking comes without its challenges,particularly when it also involves a change in developmentmethodology, as MassMutual's has. Gendron and Tuohey detailedobstacles the agile team faced and how they were managed, includingthe challenge of convincing business that agile was the rightstrategy in which to invest.

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

Unlike development methods such as waterfall, where one stage ofdevelopment has to be completed before moving on to the next, agileallows for incremental rollout of system functionality. Thisiterative development provides a continuous feedback loop betweenbusiness and IT that keeps the project on track.

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

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

Next Steps

To date, MassMutual has deployed the CESP solution for its callcenter, and a producer self-service component is in the process ofbeing rolled out. The two remaining pieces of the project aredirect customer self-service and complex transactionprocessing.

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