Staff Augmentation Services for Insurance Company

Project summary

Shortened ramp-up time speaks to the institutional knowledge the SPD Technology’s team has developed over the course of the relationship. Their perseverance and ability to solve problems have served them well in acclimating to a new, complex project. Future customers will encounter a committed partner.

Scope of our service

• Staff Augmentation
• Custom Software Development Services

Partnership details

Project length: July 2020–Ongoing
Project category: Staff Augmentation, Software Development
Project size: $50,000 – $199,999
Team size: 13 experts

Feedback was provided by the principal engineer of the Insurance Company. Here are the key takeaways from the review:

Introduce your business and what you do there.

“I’m the principal engineer at an insurance company, working for the CTO and across the engineering teams.”
What challenge were you trying to address with SPD Technology?

“We are working on building out our policy management system, and in doing that, we want to develop more billing functionality. We got in touch with SPD Technology to help source additional staff to move that initiative forward.”

What was the scope of their involvement?

“Our main effort is building up a billing service to be able to handle a basic workflow. Stages of that have been done, but we’re still in process.

The first deliverable was understanding an API with a company that we’re working with — an outside partner. This would give us a better understanding of how to enter into a business relationship with this outside partner.

Moving forward, they’ve worked to build internal interfaces, modifying workflow management and UI solutions so that internal resources can have a more automated way of accomplishing tasks as underwriters and customer success resources.”

What is the team composition?

“We started working with two people from SPD Technology. One was more of a project manager and, the other was more technical. We’ve grown the team through them and are up to 13 resources.”

How did you come to work with SPD Technology?

“We had ties between our business and references for SPD Technology. Because of that, there was a lot more trust and faith that we’d receive results from them.”

How much have you invested with them?

“We’ve spent between $50,000–$199,999 so far, and the total cost will continue to grow.”

What is the status of this engagement?

“We’ve been working together since July 2020, and we plan to continue working with them as long as we can give them meaningful work that helps them understand our company and our billing system.”

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

“The stage of the project that we’re in right now hasn’t been completed, so I can’t give too much information, but I can say that because SPD Technology was able to ramp up and get people involved quickly, we’ve been able to grow the team at a faster and faster rate. The slowest and hardest part of the process to get 4–5 people on the project, but once we had them — a foundation of people that understood the company and permissions and knew how to get connected to the code base— it was much easier to work toward seven, eight, nine, 10, and 13 people.

One resource on the team is strong in UI development, and their work has been very helpful, both in building out UIs and planning the builds. They’ve joined our internal UI architects and developers to help build our billing process.”

How did SPD Technology perform from a project management standpoint?

“The primary person managing and driving the team helps us handle the project management through Jira. We’ve also brought on a business analyst from SPD Technology, and they help with communications and project tracking. They also help identify the needs of all our stakeholders and ensure that this information is communicated.

Everyone conducts themselves professionally. Just like any business, there are many challenges — sometimes it’s multiple business stakeholders with different priorities. We’re trying to work through the right way to get everything done, and the team at SPD Technology helps us find out what’s really the best way.”

What did you find most impressive about them?

“It’s easy for anyone who gets involved in a new project — especially if they’re not used to it — to believe that the vendor will have a clean and clear understanding of what the goal is. They believe having written out documentation means there will be no questions and challenges to deal with. This isn’t the case a lot of the time, but SPD Technology does a great job of always finding a way to take the next step. This step-by-step process has been fruitful because as they come up to speed, frustration could set in due to the lack of clarity. Additionally, they’ve allowed me to make progress when I don’t have full-time engineers to work in the space.

For the things they’ve had to learn and do, they’ve been graceful in dealing with adversity. The engineers are professional in finding the balance between asking hard questions and listening for what the current state is as we’re iterating.”

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

“They are good at finding ways to ramp up quickly, but I would remind other customers to provide extra time and support in that first week or so. It’s hard for someone to learn when they’re on their own.

Plan on building a long-term relationship with them, as well, as the investment to start the project will be most worth it if you maintain that relationship. Really work to build personal relationship connections between your employees and the people on SPD Technology’s team. The latter will be able to drive the work eventually, but strong connections to internal employees will help in the early days.

As you build the team remotely, they’ll be able to ramp up new employees much easier. Additionally, document and record everything you’re doing as much as possible. If you have a meeting, make it a Zoom meeting and record the call. When there are differences from individual to individual in terms of language, being able to listen to what was said a second time helps everyone understand what’s going on. This also applies to taking clear notes on daily sync-ups.

Finally make sure that they know that you’re willing to hear questions and concerns, which will help you know where you’re really at.”