Bold EPMO Value Improvement for Insurance Company Preferred Mutual Comes from Process Agility and Innovation

Company

Founded in 1896, Preferred Mutual offers home, auto, and business insurance in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The organization has more than 300 employees located across 12 U.S. states and operates in association with more than 500 independent agents.

Challenge

Due to the changing environment within the insurance industry, including increased competition, regulatory requirements, and evolving customer demand, the EPMO needed to improve the selection, execution, and governance of initiative investments to meet business commitments and deliver value to the organization.

Solution

The organization decided that its best course of action was to seek an EPMO maturity assessment to identify gaps inhibiting the delivery of value. PM Solutions reviewed Preferred Mutual’s current project management team and existing methodology compared to industry best practices and current realities within the organization.

Identified project management gaps included:

• Help the entire organization understand the value that an EPMO delivers when it implements better project management
• Extend the project management disciplines across the enterprise
• Improve portfolio management and performance measurement capabilities
• Provide better visibility into enterprise resource capability

After the initial assessment, Preferred Mutual again called upon PM Solutions to close those critical gaps by enhancing project portfolio management with stage gating and aligning business cases to funding and benefits realization. PM Solutions closed the project management process gaps by providing customized lean and agile processes and templates. To measure and communicate value, PM Solutions’ onsite team introduced our PEMARI Framework and associated measures and metrics.

Results

The engagement built a foundation for continued EPMO maturity.

It closed assessment gaps and provided value-based measures and metrics. The new “Managing Projects at Preferred Insurance” Playbook described an end-to-end project portfolio management and governance approach, integrated with a hybrid agile approach—not for the EPMO alone, but for the entire organization. According to Chris Taft, Preferred Mutual President and CEO, “Unleashing the full potential of an enterprise PMO requires an experienced leadership team client successes results-wise enough to look beyond the fatal attraction of only near-term gains in exchange for a thoughtful implementation/maturation strategy positioning the PMO as an integral partner and successfully advancing the company’s overall change management strategy.” Achieving levels of maturity is not an overnight task or something that can be done in a silo. As a result, Preferred Mutual will continue to advance PMO maturity and enhance benefits realization to deliver improved value to the overall organization.

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