Bruce Spicer of Keystar Consultancy presented on a project that he did with Surrenda-link Investment Management to implement Appian cloud-based BPM for the process around procuring US life settlement assets (individual life insurance policies) to become part of their investment funds. They were specifically looking at a software as a service offering for this, in order to reduce cost and risk (considering the small size of their IT group), since SaaS allows them to scale up and down seamlessly without increasing costs significantly. They’ve built their own portal/user interface, using Appian Anywhere as the underlying process and analytics engine; it surprises me a bit that they’re not using more out of the box UI.
They were overtime and over budget, mostly because they (admittedly) screwed up the process mapping due to immature processes, inexperience with process analysis, and inexperience with gathering requirements versus just documenting the as-is state. Even worse, someone senior signed off on these incorrect process models, which were then used for initial development in the proof of concept before corrections were made. They made some methodology corrections after that, improving their process analysis by looking at broad processes before doing a detailed view of a functional silo, and moving to Agile development methodologies. Even with the mistakes that were made, they’re in production and on track to achieve their three-year ROI.
This should be a compelling case study, but maybe because it was just after lunch, or maybe because his presentation averaged 120+ words per slide, I had a hard time getting into this.