Insuring Santa

What insurance would Santa need, and how much would it cost?  We had a go at getting cover for St. Nick (his database of all households is a GDPR nightmare).

Santa has a lot on at this time of year.  So, we’ve taken a thing off his mind by getting him some sensible insurance for Christmas.

First stop: Travel Insurance.  Onto the internet.  Single Trip.  Mini-disaster: CompareTheMarket makes you select all the countries you need cover in.  A visit to Google confirms that 160 countries celebrate Christmas.  Damn.  10 minutes later.  Next issue: baggage cover maxes out at £4,000.  Let’s skip that – we’ve got bigger problems than £4k will solve if Blitzen throws a shoe over the North Sea.  A little creativity around date of birth and…we’re off…55 companies quoting for the chance…amazing! 9 companies quoted and the cheapest premium is £24.31.  Thank you InsureAndGo…

Next on the list: Professional Indemnity.  I had concerns about business address, but it turns out that our glorious Post Office has thought of everything.  This is – no joke – Santa’s address in case you need it: Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ.  Next thinker: does Santa need Employers Liability cover? Does he pay the elves? Does he have a modern slavery statement? Let’s hedge the bet and get him some just in case.  Then the declarations: Have you ever been bankrupt? There will have been years when the kids were especially good that must’ve brought Santa close to the line, but he’s still in business so I’m going with: No.  Get Quote…drum roll…2 providers in the mix and the winner is AXA at £276.15.  Bargain.

Finally: Commercial Vehicle insurance for the sleigh and reindeer.  It’s a tough one because pets invalidate most motor vehicle policies.  This’ll need something specialist.  Fortunately, KBIS offers an online quote facility for horse and carriage (close enough) and lists possible activities including “Long Distance/endurance (over 40km)” which seemed to cover it.  All for the premium price of £469.86.

Total to cover the old round red fella: £770.32

Conclusion: it takes a long time to get insurance for Santa, and it’s not worth it.

Company Values

We’ve all come across ‘Company Values’ at some point or other, and if you’re like me you probably thought they were bland nonsense dreamed up by HR to make the company seem fluffy to the outside world.

I went to a talk a few weeks back by a company founder who reckoned that establishing an ‘internal brand’ was the most important and difficult thing to get right. So I figured we’d give it a go at our next Innovation Day

Fortunately, at Ignite we’re of a size where we can get everyone in our Manchester office round a (very big) table, so everyone was involved in this process, which was great. We focused on our colleagues, discussing qualities in each other that we admired. We wrote these on post-it notes and put them up on the wall. To divide these dozens of notes into a few categories we came up with real-world examples of when the qualities were evident – someone introducing a new technology that saved everyone time; some who chose a halal restaurant for Friday team lunch to make sure everyone could have chicken; someone who worked late to ensure they weren’t a blocker to a project.

The post-its grouped around each other, and we chose a word that encapsulated that group of qualities. These are our company values. They’re meaningful to us, and we’re trying to refer to them in the way we interact with each other, our clients and our system.

Ignite Values

• Inclusiveness – We work best as a team in a friendly, flexible, inclusive environment. We’re honest and professional, we go out of our way to create a happy environment, and we never let people down.
• Passion – We work hard and take pride in the work we do. We proactively take ownership of new ideas, projects and things that need doing.
• Expertise – We are a team of specialists with deep commercial and technical expertise. We know our clients’ businesses and leverage our technical skills to use that knowledge to help them.
• Innovation – We are always looking to improve, both ourselves and the products we build. We are responsive, creative, and always strive towards higher quality.

Because everyone got involved, all our team can look at that list and associate some part of each value with themselves, their team-mates and their day to day work.

For those of you out there running teams/companies I highly recommend this value-identification exercise (takes about an hour). It’s a positive, creative and energising process and result.

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.

How to do a contract with a Software House

It’s a rare thing that we have to refer to a contract with a client. In 99% of cases we sign it, put it in a draw, get on with the business of delivering systems and writing policies. But it does happen, and it happened last week. So here are some learnings from that process for future clients:

In fairness, contracting with a new software company is not something brokers do every day so here are a few tips: 

1. Decide what is important to you and make sure that’s in the contract
2. If timescales are important to you put them in the contract
3. If certain functionality is important to you, make sure it is in scope

Sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how often expectation and reality are not aligned.

Going Global

Ignite is moving up in the world.  

Earlier this year we moved into larger offices in the Northern Quarter in Manchester, and in July 2018 we opened our first office in Mysore, India.  

The new offices in Manchester at 24 Lever St are a step up from the old HQ in King St.  Where King St had three flights of stairs, wonky ceilings and a break-out area called the dungeon, Lever St boasts a lift (shock), huge windows, exposed brickwork (in a good way), and enough room for the team to expand up to 50 staff.  With a board room, 100s of plants and a massive roof garden it’s well worth a visit.  

The new office in Mysore is a big adventure also.  The office will be headed up by Swetha (for those of you who know her) who has been with Ignite for over 5 years.  She hails from Mysore and her connections and knowledge have been invaluable.  The developers and testers in Mysore will provide an extra line of support and capacity for the Manchester office.  While no data can go to India, and access to live sites is totally restricted, there are lots of tweaky bug fixes, enhancement projects, and code improvement works they will contribute to.  

Everyone we’ve spoken to about having an off-shore office says that management and communications are key issues to address.  So it’s pleasing to report that we’ve had no issues on that front so far!  The Indian team are coming to Manchester this month for training and we wish them all the best.  

How to acquire an Ignite system

Here’s a handy step-by-step guide to how to acquire the Ignite Broker system.  

1. Give us a call.  We need to talk to you about your requirements to understand if we can help with what you need.  What we do is all on the Systems pages of the website but it is crucial for us to understand your requirements and aspirations. 

2. Have a demo.  If we’ve talked and got on and decided Ignite might be able to help then the next step is a web-demo.  We organise a screenshare for you and your colleagues/decision-makers because seeing is believing.  The demo usually takes about 1-2 hours depending on how well it goes and how many questions you ask. 

3. If you’re still interested then it’s NDA & Fact Find time.  This is a simple Non-Disclosure Agreement followed by a one-page Fact Find that tells us a bit more about your company (size, premium, insurers, quote volumes, users, etc).  The NDA is for your peace of mind, and the Fact Find allows us to send you a…

4. Proposal.  This document we send you summarises your requirements, the system features Ignite will deliver (bespoke and out-the-box) and sets out an indicative range of pricing for the Ignite system based on what we know so far.  If you like us and you like the Proposal, then we need to do a… 

5. Scope!  The most important phase.  Now the real work begins.  Ignite will send a friendly Business Analyst and Managing Director to your offices to detail all your requirements.  Depending on the complexity of the project this could involved a number of visits and gathering … well … everything: question sets, branding, documents, workflows, process flowcharts, integrations, bespoke work, schemes, and much more.  We charge for the scope (how much depends on the size of the project) which sorts the chancers from the dancers.  The scope is essential to aligning expectations and bottoming out requirements so don’t take it lightly! 

6.  Once the scope is completed then we can give a contract certain quote.  The scope forms an annex of the contract and is a key deliverable.  Make sure anything that is required is in the scope because if it isn’t then it won’t be delivered! 

7. Contract signed and the project is scheduled.  You’ll be assigned a Project Manager, a Business Analyst and a Test resource.  We’ll have a kick-off meeting and boom – we’re off and running.  

Breezy.

Insuring your insurance business

Q. What is a disaster recovery plan? 

1). A document put together to keep prospective clients happy

2). Something you test and review every month and hope you’ll never invoke

3). Don’t know.

It turns out insurance software companies don’t all choose option 2.

At Ignite we have a fully documented, regularly tested, and regularly reviewed disaster recovery plan.  This involves hosting in multiple locations, and even physical back-ups.  It always feels like overkill (after all we’ve never had a disaster in 5 years of trading).  But recent events at one of our esteemed competitor’s data facility has made it all seem very worthwhile.  They’ve been down for over a week, with probable loss of data, and untold damage to both their clients’ businesses and their client relationships.  

If you’re a user of that company that is having these problems, then our hearts go out to you.  You delegate this responsibility to your provider and you’ve been let down.  To be unable to write business or chase renewals, see diaries, access documents, must be awful.  Good business is built on trust and this will be hard to recover from.  

As the dust settles we sincerely hope the effect has not been too detrimental. 

If you fancy checking out a life-raft, just click: here

« Previous Page — Next Page »