System selection requirements gathering for a Underwriting Policy Administration System

System selection for a Lloyd’s managing agent

By using previously developed requirements and the Athito team’s market knowledge we shortcut the requirements gathering process and swiftly moved to Request For Information (RFI) and Request For Proposal (RFP) with a number of qualified vendors.

Our approach enabled the user community to clearly focus on their core requirements whilst still producing a holistic assessment of the solution

A traditional approach to vendor selections typically includes work-shopping requirements with the business community on whiteboards in all-day sessions, to develop a long and detailed wish-list and requirements catalogue. Unfortunately this “blank sheet of paper” approach encourages unwanted behaviours, including:

• The user community, anxious to not be caught out by missing something obvious, spends much time describing basic functionality of systems (e.g. ”ability to add an insured”). Whilst it is important to ensure this basic functionality exists within the system it is wasteful to have the user community articulate it during workshops.
• The “blank sheet of paper” builds expectations around a system’s capability. This often leads to disappointment later in the implementation and disenfranchisement of the business that can see the sessions as a wasted effort as their most important requirements have been lost or reduced in priority.
• These workshops are resource hungry from both an internal “lost opportunity cost” as well as the day-rate consultancy costs required to prepare for, facilitate, write up and validate back the output.

Our approach shortcuts documenting the “basic” functionality and instead focuses on the differentiators and unique values of the organisation enabling a more precise and targeted requirements catalogue to be defined. A smaller requirements catalogue also enables the business community to focus on what’s important.