Cover-All Blog

It has been widely stated in technology circles that approximately two-thirds of IT projects either fail or fall short of meeting critical goals.  With that in mind, the methodology used in insurance product development projects is extremely important.

According to Aaron Herrmann, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Cover-All Technologies, Inc., Cover-All employs a modified Agile project methodology when implementing such projects for its clients.  "The Agile movement proposes alternatives to traditional project management," says agilemethodology.org. "Agile approaches are typically used in software development to help businesses respond to unpredictability.

"Scrum is the most popular way of introducing Agility due to its simplicity and flexibility," the source adds. "Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self management, and striving to build properly tested product increments within short iterations. Doing Scrum as it's actually defined usually comes into conflict with existing habits at established non-Agile organizations."

Indeed, says Herrmann, the traditional "Waterfall" project management approach has significant risks and disadvantages, especially for projects that are large, complex and prone to change in requirements.

"Often considered the classic approach to the systems development life cycle, the Waterfall model describes a development method that is linear and sequential" notes Techtarget.com.  "Waterfall development has distinct goals for each phase of development."  The disadvantage of this method, says this source, is that it does not allow for much reflection or revision. "Once an application is in the testing stage, it is very difficult to go back and change something that was not well-thought out in the concept stage."

"Project management approach plays a significant role in successful execution of the project as well as providing speed to delivery so business benefits can be achieved quickly," states Herrmann. "The Agile project management style provides significant advantages when compared to traditional waterfall style.  Agile project management principals were developed to overcome limitations of the waterfall model, so with Agile, developers are now more in touch with customer needs, have project visibility, meet timelines, and notice issues early.  With Cover-All, we plan our project deliverables in 4 week sprints.  Our Dev Studio product configuration tool allows analysts to assign changes being made to a Sprint by creating and assigning work to a Ticket. Breaking work in to smaller deliverables like this keeps the development timeline in synch with changing business objectives."

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