A Delivery Methodology fit for the Vatican

Patience is worn thin these days across most walks of life. If I needed a reminder of this fact I got one recently hearing of my parents plans to spend Christmas in Rome this year.

In an act of filial duty, I offered to help them book tickets to attend the Vatican’s famous Midnight Mass service. I looked up how to reserve tickets, and whilst not exactly expecting the latest in facial recognition software, I was at least assuming the Vatican would have a website to book tickets. To my amazement, only one application method was permitted – sending a fax – a technology I thought had died out around the turn of the last century. After a phone call to my parents, a trip to their loft and a fair amount of cursing, I managed to send my first fax since, well…..ever. Then followed an anxious wait for a reply.

I am glad to say that my career in software delivery relies on producing a more efficient service. The relative speed of the emergence of new technologies in our industry has placed ever increasing demands on software suppliers to innovate, and to deliver these technologies to the market. In doing so, it has provided one of the most obvious platforms from which to differentiate oneself.

We know about the levels of importance that have been placed on upgrading technology in the insurance industry, and the need for specialist skills and experience of delivering complex solutions. We’ve talked a little about that in some of our earlier blogs, and personally, it feels great to be part of shaping the way the industry embraces the digital era.

How you deliver matters just as much as what you deliver

The importance and pressure we put on ourselves as a software supplier to differentiate ourselves through our product offerings go without saying. However, it’s not just in how we can innovate our product offerings that differentiate us. With the shift in our target market to favouring increasingly incremental, short-term solutions rather than major transformational projects, the innovation we continue to put into our solutions has also extended to how we innovate our delivery practice. What we do also needs to support our culture and desire to operate as an InsurTech leader.

Being an InsurTech innovator doesn’t just require us to focus on building great solutions, it requires us to be successful at delivering them too. Obvious perhaps, but whilst the products themselves will often take centre stage, it is very often the journey you take your stakeholders on from idea stage through to delivery and beyond, that drives customer retention, expansion, and advocacy. It is that delivery journey that has long, been for me, the differentiator that I get to play a part in, and one that continuously throws up challenges that demand the very best of people and principles.

Innovating our delivery practice doesn’t mean that there can’t be a successful blend of the old with the new. There’s nothing revolutionary about understanding the importance of having an effective delivery system, and as Russell Crowe, the actor, reminded me on the commute the other day, some of the best delivery practices have been around since Noah loaded a bunch of animals onto his Ark.

Here at AdvantageGo we may have more humble motivational reasons, but nonetheless, we understand it is not uncommon for our customers’ very jobs to be on the line. Too often, project deliveries fail because they are not correctly aligned to deliver the value originally perceived by the sponsors. As such, we are passionate about ensuring we can retain and support that alignment for the full lifecycle of a project and offer a level of delivery certainty, risk management and a sense of customer empathy that we can be proud of. Which is why we have created our ‘Go Deliver’ methodology.

Go Deliver Methodology

Our ‘Go Deliver’ principles are designed to maximise value by focusing implementations on the strategic objectives. Customer experience is not solely about how you treat a customer, although, that is definitely a very important part. Ultimately, it’s about helping them obtain value from the business relationship; and whilst it’s true to say that people make a successful implementation, those people have a greater chance of success if they are supported by the right management, standards and principles.

We have built up a track record that, through these principles, promotes consistency, certainty, rigour and quality. We have an overall delivery methodology that we are proud of, and this forms part of what we believe helps to differentiate us within the market.

The Pope’s office turned my parents down by the way. A case of the fax machine “says no”.