Milestone Planning for Digital Insurance Transformation

The way insurers implement digital transformation directly impacts their business. Half of the business in the US survive the first five years only, that includes insurance companies too. This alarming statistic shows digital transformation should be strategical.

What is the best way to implement successful digital transformation?

Answer is

“A Milestone Planning”

Keeping a milestone for business is one of the aspects to keep moving forward. A milestone is a guide in a project that signifies a change in development. And milestone planning is a method of project planning where visible indicators represent the project progress.

Milestone planning divides the whole project into the small sections. Each section consists of a target point.

These target points arranged in such a way that all other sections connected in a sequence. In milestone planning, It is essential to understand that this method shows that a milestone will achieve only after the completion of the previous milestone.

For example:

Insurers provide the policy after the underwriting analysis. A policyholder should log in first to their portal to check their policy status.

Benefits of milestone

1. Visibility of progress: Milestone makes the business more specific towards the goal. The business owner or project leader needs to check where the project is heading. The target points make it easy to understand the stages.

2. Allocate time and resource: The milestone planning represents when and what resources need to allot. A pre-set time helps to speed up the process.

3. Cost distribution: The planning of the whole project not only helps with allocating the resource but also the optimization of the budget and the cost by planning the fund distribution through milestone planning.

4. Accountability: Milestones focus on dividing responsibility within people. When people consider themselves responsible for work, they try to improve. Accountability gives a sense of responsibility and makes people focus on the task.

5. Measure success: Not only the time, budget and expertise of employees but also customer and stakeholder satisfaction need to be measure in the project. To measure the success at every target point indicators help to calculate the changes.

What is the best way of undergoing digital transformation?

1. Take strategic advice from the consultant 2. Choose how many milestones your project needed 3. Set the project deadline 4. Create a Report and make changes as per need

An insurer needs to digitize and automate business, both the concepts are not new. But when it comes to implementation, feels complicated. Successful insurers prefer to take consultation from industry-specialized consultants who solve most of the issues as they understand the customer, market and digital world best.

Consultant aligns the needs of the business that include stakeholders, customers and employees. Taking consultation from consultants and creating a project planning manages the cost, time and efforts.

Creating the automation strategy without a blueprint is complicated. Understanding of how far the project is complete, and what resources we missed, what risks are involved and how much time we need to complete the journey is made easy with milestone planning in a blueprint. Blueprints of the project make it better to understand and resolve the 90 – 99% of the allotment issues that involve physical resources, human resources, intellectual resources and financial resources.

While the execution of the project, a set time motivates to improve the speed of the project. Deadlines help to make work SMART(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound).

Creation of the report after achieving the milestone, predict the future requirement and decide changes. Create reports after completion of a milestone help to decide according to project needs.

Why should the insurer consider milestone planning?

The way the insurance industry operated is long gone. In the past, the policyholders needed to fill the form and send it through the post, then it arrived at the insurer after 1-2 days or maybe later. The insurer then searches through the bunch of files that take a couple of days or more to verify the policyholder documents and transfer the check.

But now people are more impatient and want service as soon as possible. Sometimes customers go crazy if the process is taking a bit. Making a quick decision and fast reaction to a customer request is a must.

For paying the premium, looking for new updates, history, comparing policy and applying for the policy or return, policyholders want every update online. Automation and digitalization go hand in hand. Insurance automation is not just a choice. It is a necessity to keep your customer happy.

Insurers try to automation the whole business functionalities at once it is a good idea but not the best. As we know, the sudden transformation will create problems of budget, employee friendliness, customers interaction, understanding of the system and understanding the needs of the business.

Milestone planning considered for an effortless, smooth transition from one stage to another.

Conclusion: Milestone planning is one of the crucial steps for insurance automation and digitization where budget, cost, and time managed effortlessly.