Professional Services – Specialty Insurance
Background
By the Autumn of 2020, our client, a highly successful start-up international specialty insurer and reinsurer, had grown to a team of 300 in less than two years following a hugely successful launch and a multi-billion-dollar investment.
Having worked very successfully with a tier one consultancy to help define their high-level strategy for delivering change, they now sought an agile professional services delivery partner to help them deliver this strategy as well as respond to changing business needs and regulatory requirements.
Their key requirements were a supplier who could provide specialist insurance domain knowledge and expertise in Project Management, Business Analysis, Systems Analysis, Test Management and Data Analysis.
Why the client chose us
Following a recommendation, we were given the opportunity to meet with their senior management team and present our offering for them to evaluate against several other competing consultancy suppliers. They chose to award us with an initial piece of work for several key reasons, these included:
- our in-house specialist Technology and Change recruitment business that enables us to source specialist consultants with a precise experience fit for project requirements
- our ability to attract the best people in the market by offering outside IR35 engagements
- our ability to rapidly source, on-board and scale up teams of consultants
- our blended T&M and fixed price charging structure which ensures all parties are focused on successfully delivering outcomes
- our competitive pricing
- our shared company values.
What we did
Our Engagement Delivery Manager (in this case, our Head of Consulting) and our Relationship Manager worked with the client’s Change leadership team to quickly understand their needs and project priorities. We then shaped the services required, defined the key outcomes, and produced high-level Statements of Works to cover the initial engagement.
Working closely with the William Alexander Recruitment team, the Engagement Delivery Manager and Relationship Manager then worked with our in-house resourcing teams to source and selected the team from our established community of Contractor Associates. Once the team was agreed with the client, we then quickly, (within three weeks), landed an initial team of four Project Managers and two Business Analysts to mobilise some of the key projects.
Our Engagement Manager then worked with the on-site team to further shape the services and detail the scope, deliverables and payment milestones in both the Statements of Work and in our Contractor Associate Sub-Consultancy Agreements.
As the projects and initiatives gained traction and the need for larger project teams grew, William Alexander Consulting was able to respond quickly and rapidly deployed a further 15 Consultants by the end of Q2 providing Project Management, Business Analysis, Technical Analysis, Data Analysis and Test Management services across various key change programmes, strategic projects and business change projects.
Results
Since January 2021 we have successfully built a team of over 75+ high-quality consultants with an average turnaround time of two to four weeks between receiving a service request, and a consultant starting on site. This has enabled our client to maintain project velocity against extremely challenging timescales.
Our team of William Alexander consultants are working closely with all the relevant business stakeholders and actively helping to embed agile best practices.
We have received glowing praise at the most recent Service Review and are now established as one of our clients’ strategic professional services partners going forwards.