Supplier Portal: Finally Compliant

tl;dr

• Industry: Insurance
• Portals for collaboration with appraisers and restructuring partners
• Transformation of responsibilities in parallel with continuous development and seamless operation
• Increased value through improved integration interfaces with other specialized applications

Situation

The client company operates in the claims management sector of the insurance industry. They coordinate daily collaboration with thousands of appraisers and restoration partners. Over the course of approximately 15 years, the client company has developed several web portals. This ensures efficient, secure, and data protection-compliant collaboration. However, the development, maintenance, and operation of these portals were completely outsourced to a single external IT service provider.

There were four reasons why the existing setup was no longer viable for the client:

1. During the 2020s, regulatory requirements for insurance companies became significantly stricter. In particular, the dependence on a single service provider was criticized as insufficient in the context of DORA (keyword: Business Continuity Management / BCM).
2. The existing external service provider could no longer keep pace with the flood of new feature requirements.
3. Key features required close collaboration with internal departments in the host environment (IT and business units) during implementation. The existing service provider lacked the necessary skills.
4. The entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) was located outside the corporate systems—a lack of control. The client was no longer willing to accept this risk for these critical systems.

The client decided to launch a tender process to find new service providers.

Challenges

The key challenges:

• The existing service provider provided only the bare minimum of support during the handover. Knowledge of the system had to be rebuilt from scratch—as did development tooling and automation.
• Business Continuity Management (BCM) requirements necessitated a multi-service provider approach. A functioning collaboration model had to be established.
• The productive takeover of development, maintenance, and operations had to guarantee continuous, seamless availability.
• No prior knowledge was available regarding how to migrate an externally operated Business-Managed Application (BMA) back into the corporate infrastructure.
• The cost of delay for the outstanding features created significant pressure to deliver.

Solution

The key aspects of the project implementation by Metamorphant are:

• Use of generalists – resulting in direct, rapid progress instead of long waiting times and high coordination efforts
• Development of Jira boards and backlogs as a central organizational anchor for teamwork – starting point: a proven combination of Scrum (for BUILD, i.e., stories, epics, etc.) & Kanban (for RUN, i.e., incidents, tasks, bugs, etc.)
• Establishment of supportive rituals within the team (daily routines, refinements, peer reviews, pair programming, planning, design memos, incident post-mortems, dashboards, etc.)
• Building trust with the external service provider from the agency environment – ​​finding a way to manage different work rhythms, habits, and expectations
• Establishing clear shared ownership across the entire team – especially working on the same stories with mutual reviews instead of dividing them into components with separate ownership
• “Intelligence work” to penetrate corporate processes and guidelines – a recurring observation with many corporate clients: corporations often don’t understand their own processes and responsibilities.
• Building a separate demo environment for an initial understanding → rapid contact with reality, mitigating risks, e.g., through the absence of dependencies.
• Creating an operational concept with clear decisions regarding trade-offs and service levels – quick, painful decisions instead of illusions.
• Establishing clear architectural guidelines to accelerate decision-making (Don’t make it worse, consistency over correctness, a.k.a. respect the prevailing style, etc.).
• Migrating and supplementing the existing backlog – extracting a high-level roadmap (epics) for focus.
• Focusing on exactly one milestone at a time: doing everything possible to remove blockers instead of creating side projects – effectiveness over (perceived) efficiency.
• Using a pragmatic roadmap to set ambitious modernization goals and then derive achievable intermediate steps. – A stable mix of technical and functional features for each sprint
• Development of a clear documentation structure (user and process documentation in Confluence, developer documentation close to the code in GitLab)
• Establishment of a documentation culture – decisions, processes, instructions; everything should be transparent
• Use of visualization instead of text-heavy documents – e.g., creating a clickable deep link overview of all tools and instances to balance tool scattering
• Active risk management: identifying risks through manual analysis in regular reports, strict prioritization and focus on the main risks, continuous risk reduction
• Mantra-like emphasis on customer value, sharpening customer understanding – especially when special interests emerge

A (paraphrased) customer quote sums it up nicely: “…what is possible when people simply solve problems and don’t just manage them.”

Technologies

• PHP
• Laravel
• Laravel Nova
• MySQL
• Vue.js
• Tailwind CSS
• MapBox
• Docker
• Redis
• Meilisearch
• Plesk
• Mailtrap
• Bugsnag
• Storybook

Why was the phant the right partner?

• Value system: To build a multi-service provider constellation, you need partners who prioritize customer benefit over their own self-interest.
• Realistic self-image / Humility: Complex projects are team sports. You need people who communicate honestly, acknowledge their limitations, and seek the right support when needed. Overcommitment helps no one.
• Legacy expertise: Working with legacy systems is a key competency for metamorphant. Recovering lost knowledge is also part of their daily routine.
• Generalists instead of specialists: Specialist roles are ineffective for structuring and solving complex problems. You need experienced generalists who aren’t afraid of anything—be it hands-on development, operations/DevOps, product management, security, business analysis, or direct communication with all types of customer employees (techies, management, stakeholders, business units, etc.). When a horde of specialists is involved, a complex project can easily be bogged down in handover overhead and friction—not to mention that most projects simply don’t have the budget for so many roles. One full-time metamorphant thus pays off many times over.
• Technical depth: Metamorphants aren’t afraid to delve deeply into and question technology. They understand the alternatives. They don’t have to rely on claims on paper, vague statements, or unreliable AI summaries.
• Relying on proven patterns: Metamorphants draw on the collective experience of the entire team. Due to the focus on legacy systems, projects tend to be similar. Successful approaches are repeated, such as operational concepts, security guidelines, and architectural principles.
• Consistency to completion: The 80/20 rule is often a good principle for new developments. It’s not suitable for migrations and phase-outs. Only 100% performance and the permanent decommissioning of old systems or components count here.
• Operations Experience: Supported by DevOps and SRE methodologies, Metamorphanten possesses the ability to successfully operate systems. Certified processes and best practices can be helpful, but the user experience must always be the primary focus.
• Implementation Strength: Unlike other legacy experts, we don’t just analyze; we put our expertise into the process from start to finish.