Doorway Episode 4 – Gathering Requirements

Requirements are undoubtedly the most important aspect to the success of any project. However, the process and approach to gathering requirements can make all the difference in how long the project will take to complete. 

Regardless if you are using waterfall, Agile, or any other buzz-methodology, requirements gathering can take months or even a year depending on the size and complexity of the project. When vendors say they need several months to gather requirements, that should be your first red flag.

There are several problems with this approach, and here are our top 3.

1 Requirements are not forever

The further you get into the project, the more requirements become obsolete. Every deliverable during an implementation will change perspective on future deliverables, thus change the client’s requirements. What the client thought they wanted or needed during the requirements gathering phase is most definitely going to change throughout the project. Furthermore, it makes no sense to gather requirements for something that isn’t even ready to be implemented. Gathering future requirements in the onset of the project is completely premature.

2 Extensive requirements gathering delays delivering value

This is a bit of a no-brainer, but when vendors spend months gathering requirements, they are not delivering anything to the client. This happens regardless of what methodology you are using. You should ask yourself if your business and investment can wait months or even a year before seeing any functional deliverables.

3 Customer probably already has initial requirements

In most situations, the customer already has something documented that can serve as requirements. For whatever reason though, many vendors come into a project thinking that they need to “redefine” or “rewrite” the customer’s requirements. Not only does this take forever to complete, it also provides very little value. 

The ClarionDoor Experience

In our experience, we realized that gathering “future” requirements actually delays development and client deliveries. Delivering something functional into your hands as fast as possible enables you to evaluate what those next requirements need to be. The result is a better quality system, and faster timelines to go live. 

One example is our rating and issuance projects. They all start with the basic fundamentals of every insurance product – factors, premium calculations, list of forms, and underwriting rules. Send us what you have and we take it from there, delivering you a functional system within weeks. 

Learn more at clariondoor.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for the latest ClarionDoor updates.

Doorway Episode 10 – The Upgrade

Upgrading insurance software is like doing laundry. You know it has to be done, but even the thought of it is painful. However, there are some alternatives. You could just avoid people all together, say that you are testing out a new scent to explain the smell, or scrap your entire wardrobe and go on a shopping spree. These might sound like great options, but they just aren’t practical. When it comes to insurance software, upgrades have become the dreaded dirty laundry for many insurers. Here is our take on insurance software upgrades. 

Doorway Episode 3 – Innovation

It goes without saying that innovation is the epicenter of the insurance industry. Insurance providers are starving for innovation, and technology providers are competing to deliver. However, there is a fundamental problem with how the industry views and understands what innovation means. Innovation, in general terms, is defined as a new method, idea, or product; however, innovation in the insurance industry has been reduced to a label. 

Over the past decade, there has been a surge of buzz-innovation in the industry like artificial intelligence, blockchain, internet of things, and so on. Some of the buzz is just a remarketing of past concepts, while others truly are new, innovative ideas. Technology providers were quick to slap an “innovation-buzzword” sticker on their software to give the impression that they were innovative. The reality though is that it was just a label. 

This is the litmus test that many insurers fail to administer – asking the basic question of “what problem does this solve.” Believe it or not, there are many insurers today that still have inefficient, manual underwriting processes; cannot launch new products for emerging markets because their core systems are antiquated; or even make simple product changes without a massive multi-month project. Hate to break it to you, but AI, blockchain, [pick your buzz] won’t help solve these problems.

Unfortunately, there are many technology and solution providers that use these labels, and many insurance companies have invested in these concepts. As a matter of fact, some insurance companies have departments dedicated to them. 

The ClarionDoor Experience

At ClarionDoor, we believe that innovation starts with identifying and understanding real industry problems and developing advanced technology to solve them. When we started ClarionDoor, we recognized that the industry had become distracted with theoretical technologies that really didn’t address the challenges facing insurers. 

But we also recognized that great technology alone isn’t enough to be innovative. It takes great people that understand insurance, and great processes that actually get clients live. It is that combination of product, process, and people that forms the ClarionDoor experience which has been effective for companies to go live in weeks, and liberating them to focus on innovation not implementation.