The organization had tried five times over seven to ten years to replace the legacy system it used to calculate advisor commissions, and each attempt had collapsed under a project approach built for evolving scope, not a fixed deadline. Years of ad hoc rule changes had buried the calculation engine in thousands of nested, undocumented rules, and no one could say with confidence whether the numbers coming out the other side were actually right. When a vendor dispute forced the organization's hand, leadership set a one-year deadline it could not afford to miss again. The organization didn't have a technology problem so much as a decade of undocumented decisions nobody had ever been asked to explain.
Case Study
How five failed attempts at replacing a commission system became one that finally worked.
This financial services organization serving military members and their families had spent nearly a decade and five failed attempts trying to replace the legacy system it used to pay its financial advisors. We led the delivery that finally got it live, on a deadline the organization couldn't afford to miss again.
Engagement at-a-glance
Industry:
Financial Services and Insurance
Organization size:
~ $1B in revenue & 375,000 clients served
Services:
Initiative Recovery & Stabilization
Strategic Initiative Leadership
Project & Program Delivery
Strategic Initiative Leadership
Project & Program Delivery
The Challenge
The problem wasn't the software. It was that no one had ever written down what a correct answer looked like.
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Years of rules layered on top of rules
Every time the organization wanted to change how it incentivized advisors, the habit was to add a new rule rather than revise the old one. Over years, that produced thousands of nested rules that nobody could reverse-engineer, because the underlying business logic had never been documented in the first place.
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No definition of a correct payout
Success had always been measured by whether a new calculation matched the old system's output, not by whether either one was actually correct. The organization could be 98 percent matched to its legacy numbers and still be off by millions of dollars, with no way to know which side was wrong.
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A deadline with no track record of being met
Prior attempts had run on a scaled agile approach designed for evolving scope, not a hard cutover date, and the finance leader driving the effort was a strong accountant without the program management background the initiative needed. Five failed attempts later, the organization still didn't have a way to run this kind of project under deadline pressure.
Our Approach
Doing what the deadline demanded, while building toward real discipline.
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1
Assessed the accuracy of the legacy calculation engine
Before leading the initiative, the team built test data sets to measure how close a new calculation could get, not just to the old system's output, but to what the correct payout should have been in the first place.
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2
Replaced scaled agile with disciplined waterfall project management
Brought the sequencing, milestones, and deadline discipline the fixed timeline required, in place of the open-ended, evolving-scope approach that had failed five times before.
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3
Documented the commission rules the organization had never written down
Worked with client teams to define, for the first time, what a correct payout actually looked like, rather than one that simply matched legacy figures nobody had verified.
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4
Delivered the system and handed it off as a standalone product
Completed the implementation in 15 months and transferred the tool to the organization's own team, which now operates and maintains it independently.
Value Delivered
A payout process leadership finally trusts enough to run without us.
Delivered a working commission system after five failed tries
Completed the replacement the organization had attempted and abandoned five times over the prior decade.
Brought deadline discipline the initiative had never had
Introduced the waterfall structure and milestone rigor a fixed-deadline project required, in place of an approach never built for one.
Documented commission rules the organization had never written down
Captured, for the first time, the business logic behind how advisors are paid, replacing years of undocumented, nested rule changes.
Left the organization operating the system on its own
Handed off a fully functioning tool that now runs as an independent, self-sustained product inside the organization.
Results that reflect the work behind them.
15-months
From the restart of the initiative to full organizational adoption of the new system
100
People engaged across The Gunter Group and the organization to deliver the initiative
$8M
Invested to finally deliver the system, following approximately $25M spent over the prior decade on failed attempts
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