A division of Teleglobe Inc., Teleglobe Insurance Services provided services to the insurance market in Canada, US and UK. Services included outsourced IT operations and processing, packaged insurance business application software, packaged broker application software and industry databases.

Teleglobe Insurance Services was acquired and absorbed by CGI Group Inc.

Project Summary

Established a “software factory” for the release management and delivery of packaged software.

Product Management for Assure 2000, a software package for medium-sized insurance companies in Canada, the US and the UK, rationalizing the work of three development shops: Toronto, Boston and Bristol, UK.

Background

TIS had had many years of financial success selling and using an insurance business software application to support a number of medium sized insurance companies in Canada. Through acquisitions in the US and the UK, the market had grown but there was a need to upgrade the application package to take advantage of technology advances.

A project was underway to port the software to client-server architecture. The project had exceeded time and budget estimates and although understood to be close to pilot delivery, was slipping again.

Project After Discovery

The project had been initiated without recognizing fundamentals of system design and differences between different technologies. The expediency of porting application components did not recognize the requirement of a central architecture, database design and user interface design standards.

Approach

• Reorganized to ensure development teams took complete release responsibility which included multi-component scope.
• Visited product development operations in US and UK to assess degree of difference and similarity in requirements.
• Developed a strategy to adopt UK architecture, Canadian design and code and US development approach to develop a common, generic product that would be implemented in all three markets by local variation.