How important is your job?

I can’t claim original thinking on the insight into job importance that I’m about to give you. Even though the idea isn’t mine I can’t find it on the internet after trying a couple of searches, so I’m going to write it down.

I was prompted to write this post after meeting a chap at an entrepreneur’s event this week who, when I asked him what he did, said “toy maker”. I was so jealous. My job – director at a software house that licences a policy administration platform to specialist brokers – is much harder to say in two words. And also much harder to explain to a 5-year-old.

For those of you wondering how important your job is – here’s a graph to tell you. Simply estimate, in seconds, how long it would take to explain your job to a 5-year-old. Find that number of seconds on the horizontal axis. Run your finger up till you hit the line, take a left, and there you go: your job importance scored out of 10!

If you feel, like me, that it’d take a bit longer than 10 seconds and that maybe ‘never’ ought to be an option, then I feel your pain

Product Roadmap 2020

In 2019 Ignite delivered some truly exciting developments on our product roadmap. We stepped up our data enrichment portfolio by integrating with Lexis Nexis and MyLicence; we re-wrote our entire front-end in vue.js with Web APIs to make development of beautiful customer-facing sites quick and dexterous; we overlaid Microsoft’s PowerBI on our client databases to provide powerful reporting dashboards.

Enough of that trumpet – what does 2020 hold? Here are a few highlights:

• Multi-Cover. You’ve seen Admiral and a few others do it. Well, this facility will be coming to Ignite users in 2020. Any end-customer buying a second policy can align their renewal dates and have a single direct debit, as standard.
• Intelligent Add-ons. Brokers often have a large suite of add-on products available but offering dozens to customers is confusing and off-putting. Ignite is building a machine learning tool that looks at the demographics of previous customers’ purchases to recommend the most relevant add-ons, and at the right price.
• Machine Learning. Working with dozens of brokers and major aggregators Ignite sees a lot of data. We obfuscate this data (get rid of personal details like names, contact details, addresses) and store it. In 2020 we’re launching a project to leverage this data using Microsoft Azure’s Machine Learning toolkit to give regular insights to our brokers and insurers.

All these projects will run alongside our usual innovation day initiatives, 3 exciting new client projects (2 of which are top-50 UK brokers), and recruitment to grow both our Manchester and Mysore teams.

2020 promises to be quite a year.

Innovation Day

Innovation Day might sound like some ham-fisted new government initiative to boost national productivity. And one day it might be, but for now it’s a monthly day of blue sky innovation that we do at Ignite.

Aren’t you innovating all the time?

Sure, that’s what the marketing people will tell you. But really who ever gets a good chunk of time to chew ideas over with their teammates, to build prototypes, try new technologies? Pretty much no one – day to day work is too full on. So we started doing Innovation Days

How does it work?

One day a month (always a Friday), we schedule no regular work. Everyone comes in to the office and splits into self-defined teams. Teams include business analysts, devs, testers, senior managers and board members…basically everyone! The challenge is this: come up with an idea and build a working prototype to show to everyone at the end of the day. It can be anything: from a sales tool, to a new customer interface, to a new app.

And then what?

Pretty much all of the ideas we’ve worked on have been great ideas. But not many actually work. The great skill of Innovation Day is not coming up with a killer idea, but the ability to break it down into its most basic form so that it can be built in a day. It just so happens that this is great practice for the day to day business of delivering software projects. And good fun.

What have you come up with?

Too many things to list, but here are some highlights: a visualisation of the timeline of a policy (that went into production environments a week after the innovation day); a live MI smartphone app for MD/CEOs; a project run entirely through Microsoft DevOps; a super-fast batch automation test tool for schemes; and an advance site health monitor.

If you’re reading this and you’ve got any ideas – send us a message on Linkedin or privately and we’ll see if we can’t build it for in a day…

Agile

If you’re a broker, it’s probably been a while (since you last undertook a big software project)…

At Ignite we’ve done over 40 implementations in the last 7 years. In that time we’ve learned a lot. So here are a few of our learnings about project management:

• It is impossible to perfectly predict an end date for a 4 week+ project
• Requirements change
• We know something will go wrong during development, but we don’t know what it is yet

It’s not an ideal list. Ideally, you would know when you’d get your system and that you’d get all of it.

That’s why we run our projects using the Agile method. We do this to mitigate all the problems listed above.

Here are some of the key principles of working agile:

• Working software is the primary measure of progress
• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
• Business people and developers must work together throughout the project

That’s a better list!

By focusing on that second list the first one becomes less problematic. To demonstrate:

• Predicting an end date matters less if working software is seen to be advancing throughout the project
• Changing requirements are welcomed and discussed with the customer so they understand the impact of change on delivery and cost
• When things go wrong business people understand the reason and the impact immediately

Our process is constantly evolving but if you’re a broker looking at a system don’t expect to specify everything, wait 12 weeks, and get a perfect system. You’re going to be involved throughout.