The insurance business is one of the most rapidly changing industries today. To keep up with the pace of change and honour their over 140-year history, the Fennia Group wanted to ensure their service development work was in line with the company’s wider strategy. But how to achieve clarity on where the business is heading?

”Belive it or not, our IT function didn’t use to enjoy a great reputation in the C-suite! The business side felt the IT people were always saying ’No, hold on a minute now!’ in response to all development ideas,” chuckles Petteri Miinalainen, Fennia CIO.

And there were many development projects indeed. The insurance industry is moving at a fast pace and facing a myriad of demands from customers, legislators and evolving technology.

”At one point our development backlog was 240 items long. For the top management, a situation like this looks chaotic. We needed to find a way to focus our development work on the areas that best support our group-wide strategy,” says Tapio Korttilalli, Director of Service Development and Partnerships at Fennia.

”We just didn’t have a proper prioritisation funnel and governance,” summarises Miinalainen.

A unified model of organising development work would not only help make decision-making more effective, but also bring down costs, shorten product lead-times and simplify vendor management.

”It was clear we needed a model to organise ourselves. But we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Korttilalli says…