Carrier Management published “When a Digital Transformation Is Nearly Grounded at Takeoff” written by John Rodgers, Yogesh Sheth, Andrew Solar, and Jordan Heichel looking at the role of digital in the future of the business-to-business insurance market.

“For months, our team carefully monitored the project timeline to see if there would be enough time to roll out a multimillion-dollar digital transformation for a leading re-insurance organization with more than 3,200 professionals in over 60 offices around the world. With nearly a hundred team members working tirelessly over the past year to deliver, the group found ourselves abruptly halted on the tarmac, just as we were about to take off. People were looking around for answers, wondering what was going on. Would the project be grounded?

The uncertainty was driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. How could the team deliver a new global IT system to hundreds of users across multiple time zones who suddenly could not go into the office? This became the team’s “plane grounded; how do we take off?” moment. As the world faced an uncertain future, the project team scrambled to figure out how to deliver a new technology completely remotely. Bunkered in basements and shoved in spare bedrooms, the leadership team gathered to brainstorm options for getting this “plane” off the ground.

Before this setback, the team was midway through a four-year digital transformation journey with a global processing platform. After a previous successful rollout in Europe, the team was following a similar, roughly thousand-step playbook to deliver the global platform in North America, with the goal of future-proofing a leading financial services firm. At the end of the journey, this organization would digitize its global operating model to expedite transaction execution, reduce cost and enhance overall service delivery.

The approach taken at the last minute to execute a “pandemic-proof plan” leveraged new tools to support a remote digital transformation. This will become the norm for rolling out similar digitization strategies in the future. Business has forever been altered, and as companies push forward to transform, the winners will have embraced these new realities. The results during the pandemic have proven that organizations can lead successful implementations virtually.”

Read the full deep dive into our team’s work here.