Project Recovery (Agile Program)

Client: Insurance Company

Category: Vendor, Quality, Program Management

A small insurance company was directed by its U.S. owner to use a foreign testing company as their key resource in the replacement of its software.  The rationale was that the insurance company could get a better price for the vendor’s services because the U.S. company was using the same testing company.

Unfortunately, the U.S. company encountered serious weaknesses in their vendor’s ability to test which ultimately cost that company hundreds of millions of dollars in setting up a set of emergency call centers, regulatory fines, hiring back their QA staff at a premium, and a complete replacement of the implemented software that had just been “tested”.

The smaller insurance company had been experiencing many of the same problems and had fortunately not yet implemented its solution.  Our client decided that it needed to take a hard look at what was going on in the realm of testing.  ETHITEQUE was called in to evaluate and, ultimately, restructure their testing effort.  Up until this point, the client had been taking direction from the testing company in terms of how to test, as the vendor had positioned itself as the “expert”.  While it was true that the vendor had many excellent presentations on testing, their staff did not have the breadth of experience required to lead a successful testing effort.

ETHITEQUE set out a proper Test Strategy with clearly defined roles and responsibilities as well as a proper governance structure that put the Business team in charge of accepting the results, not the foreign testers.  As well, we guided our client in hiring the right on shore contract Test Manager who reported directly in to the Business Executive in charge of the success of the software replacement program.

Established proper governance structure with onshore Test Manager reporting directly to Business Executive accountable for the project’s success.