We reached out to Luminate when we needed to onboard an experienced Programme Manager at pace to pick up and deliver on a key company initiative. We required someone that could hit the ground running, had resilience and could successfully keep the many moving parts to task and on-time. Their people skills had to be second to none to ensure that the customer was kept honest so a calm composure was a must. Luminate delivered on all these requirements and more.
Thank you to the team at Luminate for introducing us to Janet and yet another example of the high calibre people you continue to provide us with at Kiwibank.
I would just like to express my appreciation of the Business Analysts (Kiri and Jeetesh) that Luminate has provided to help us achieve success in some critical initiatives at Partners Life. They are knowledgeable, resourceful, friendly and professional and it’s a pleasure working with them. This is also testament to the support and guidance they receive from Luminate while on client engagements.
Partners Life prides itself in leading the market and the development of a new adviser remuneration structure once again challenged everyone involved to deliver a market leading innovation that will set the standard for adviser remuneration in the future. Without any template available, the project team, under the guidance of the Luminate project manager, successfully navigated through complexity and delivered on all the objectives of the project. The PM’s experience, communication skills and drive to succeed, were key factors to ensure the successful completion of the project. I was impressed by his understanding of our objectives and his focus to find solutions.
Partners Life’s desire to formalise the advice outcomes that customers receive in their engagements with their financial advisers was the key driver behind the COM project. From imagining the concept, through business casing, development of the proof of concept and all the way through to operationalising and automating the data, process flows and reporting. The complexity of the work involved was significant. One of the things that this project again reinforced to me was the importance of an effective but adaptive project team that was empowered and enabled to make decisions, encouraged to communicate frequently and effectively, but also the importance of utilising the best people possible – both from across the business and through our vendor relationships. We were fortunate to have a Luminate PM lead this project. Their experience, communication and planning skills were critical to its success. But more than anything, Luminate’s buy-in to the vision of what we were trying to achieve and passion to work with people to solve the execution, were what I recognised and appreciated most.
To get our business critical programme delivered required just the right type of programme manager. Someone to take accountability end-to-end, who was good at working with the business to understand the drivers, as well as driving a solution through all the delivery teams. They needed to be strong at executive level engagement, to be able to align teams to an outcome, and have the ability to cut through all the noise to just make things happen. Luminate understood our business and its drivers and was able to provide the right type of programme manager to suit our business culture and work with our stakeholders. They ensured this very complex programme was delivered on time, to budget and with a scope that enabled the business to over achieve on their results.
We were struggling to find a project manager with the right capability, experience and leadership to steady the ship on one of our business critical projects. Thankfully Luminate was able to provide a senior PM from their team, who dealt in facts, had the right experience with contact centre platform replacements and was able to manage vendor relationships exceptionally well. Even more importantly, they relished the challenge! There are a lot of project managers in the market, however not many that are as highly capable.
When we needed an independent view of the health of Kiwibank’s projects we engaged Luminate. Their team of experienced and instinctive professionals, combined with Luminate’s no-nonsense project assurance model, provided us with what we needed – the root causes of problems, a clear and true view of each project’s chance of success and clear recommendations on the way forward.
We were having difficulty progressing a large enterprise wide project and I needed to reassess and reset our approach. I engaged Luminate and they helped us put in place a realistic and believable recovery plan to get the project delivered. One of the keys to the successful recovery was the experience and resilience demonstrated by the Luminate team.
I was looking for a partner to assist us with two strategic programmes of work. I chose Luminate because I wanted a partner that I could trust and had a track record of delivery. They provided key resources that have really driven and owned the delivery of these programmes of work. They have also demonstrated to us what good programme resources should look like, a real bench mark for us for future project work.
Jarrod is my go to programme manager. When I need something done and done right, he is the first person I call.
Case study – Partners Life
About the company:
Partners Life is a recognised industry leader in New Zealand’s life and health insurance industry. Its rapid rise to the top has been built on very strong partnerships with customers and independent financial advisers across the country.
Context:
In July 2020, Partners Life launched a ground-breaking remuneration system for its financial advisers, aligning their remuneration structure with feedback directly from customers based on the outcomes they receive, in what has become an industry benchmark. Partners Life call this their Customer Outcome Matrix (COM).
The problem statement:
Partners Life didn’t have a system they could simply improve or adapt to achieve this customer outcome-driven remuneration structure.
As Tony Arthur, Partners Life’s Chief Commercial Officer and project sponsor, says: “It was the creation of a novel and functionally critical process that hadn’t been done before … consequently there were lots of unknowns creating complexity. This made the definition and sizing of the solution to integrate and automate the solution difficult.”
The new system had to unpick legacy business rules, build new functionality and integrate with existing systems. There were also issues around manual inefficiencies and operational costs which COM was tasked with addressing.
The fix:
Partners Life outsource much of their project delivery capability and system support to trusted vendors. The COM project required engagement of these vendor partners for the entire lifecycle of the project, from feasibility and initiation through to project closure. This included project management specialist Luminate to lead the delivery, along with Bravura (Sonata – core insurance platform), Provoke (system integrator), Altis (BI), TTC (test management), Fusion5 (CRM) and Ugam (Qualtrics survey platform).
The outcome:
Partners Life successfully delivered the capability required to transform adviser remuneration and align with customer outcomes.
Lessons learned:
The post implementation review attributed the success of the project to four key areas:
Having a clearly documented ‘north star’ from the beginning, clearly outlining the problem, the vision, the success criteria, responsibilities, milestones, cost breakdowns and timelines.
A no surprises policy at the outset, allocating time and funding to running a proof of concept (POC) to flush out issues early. Given the project was looking to deliver something completely novel for the industry, it was imperative that low risk discovery was completed up front.
Choosing excellent people. The vendor teams consisted of high performing individuals who always showed ‘skill and will’ to deliver against the odds. Trust was built early across all the vendor teams. Cross vendor collaboration and commitment was key.
Appointing a strong and highly responsive sponsor and business owner to the project. Projects without escalation paths typically and inevitably derail projects. However, all project roles, responsibilities and accountabilities were conveyed, understood and accepted at the initiation stage of the project.
Customer feedback:
Tony Arthur (CCO) Partners Life – “Partners Life’s desire to formalise the advice outcomes that customers receive in their engagements with their financial advisers was the key driver behind the COM project. From imagining the concept, through business casing, development of the proof of concept and all the way through to operationalising and automating the data, process flows and reporting. The complexity of the work involved was significant. One of the things that this project again reinforced to me was the importance of an effective but adaptive project team that was empowered and enabled to make decisions, encouraged to communicate frequently and effectively, but also the importance of utilising the best people possible – both from across the business and through our vendor relationships. We were fortunate to have a Luminate PM lead this project. Their experience, communication and planning skills were critical to its success. But more than anything, Luminate’s buy-in to the vision of what we were trying to achieve and passion to work with people to solve the execution, were what I recognised and appreciated most.
Case study – Network For Learning
About the company:
The Network For Learning (N4L) is a Crown company charged with the responsibility of connecting over 2,450 schools and more than 850,000 teachers and students to the internet via N4L’s Managed Network.
N4L enjoys close partnerships with the Ministry of Education, Local Fibre and ICT Companies, and Spark.
The Managed Network itself provides industry-leading safety and security tools, creating a safer online environment that gives educators, students and their parents the confidence to use digital technologies for learning. The tools include robust internet filtering, threat protection and firewall, supported by a dedicated ’field based’ relationship team, and skilled helpdesk team.
The problem statement:
N4L started a programme of work to upgrade the managed network into all 2460 schools.
The upgrade consisted of a product replacement of the current Cisco CWS Firewall product, due to go end-of-life by June 2019, with a new Fortinet solution.
The upgrade is understood to be the largest network migration in New Zealand.
Given the fact that the CWS solution was going end of life, N4L had a limited amount of time to migrate schools. The first milestone in the migration was 400 schools by the end September 2018.
The N4L Executive team identified that the size and scale of the migration meant that the in-house operational team needed additional expert support to i) plan and implement the migration and to ii) put in place the appropriate ongoing governance structure and controls to ensure the programme was right-sized to hit the milestone commitments beyond September 2018.
The fix:
Luminate was contacted by (N4L) CEO Larrie Moore & CPO Gavin Costello in August 2018 to provide an expert Programme Manager to undertake an assessment of the programme structure, and to establish and run a programme of work to ensure the upgrade is delivered on time and budget.
This involved putting together a migration strategy and execution plan to enable the coordination 12 ICT companies across the country, and a multi company team of 100 strong in Auckland.
The programme execution involved the coaching and mentoring of team members who were critical to the programme’s success as well as the alignment of N4L’s delivery structure with the new Agile structure at Spark, the primary vendor. In doing so and through the adoption of Agile practices, the progress of the programme became highly visible to the N4L executive team and helped build organisation-wide momentum towards the hitting of critical milestones.
The new strategy and delivery approach were approved and put into action in August 2018.
The migration exited the pilot phase and entered the full deployment phase in early September and by 30th September, the team had migrated 407 schools.
Customer feedback:
Gavin Costello CPO (N4L) – ‘I contacted Luminate when we as a company identified the need for a specialist delivery manager to help coordinate the team to hit 400 schools by the end of September. Now that we have the Luminate team on board we are confident we will achieve our goal of 2,460 schools by June 2019.’
Larrie Moore CEO (N4L) – ‘When looking for a partner to assist us with a critical programme of work, I chose Luminate because they offered the needed expertise, experience and they were easy to deal with.’
