FROM OUR PARTNERS:
ANNOUNCING OUR NEWEST PRINCIPAL, PERIN WEHDE
The Gunter Group is excited to announce that Perin Wehde has joined the firm in Denver, CO as its newest Principal.
Perin comes to TGG with over 22 years of multinational consulting experience and brings significant expertise helping organizations develop visions and align strategies in order to successfully execute complex change initiatives that improve business performance. Perin is a passionate problem solver and an energetic, relationships focused leader that uses a listen-first approach to help organizations and teams drive towards a common goal. Perin’s leadership role will serve as another valuable addition to our Denver based team and our growing list of client partners in Colorado.
When asked about the announcement, TGG Founding Partner Mike Gunter stated:
“Welcoming Perin as Principal and as a member of our senior leadership team is a very exciting moment. Perin’s high level of experience and strong professional background in the consulting industry will be a great addition to TGG. Her skills, leadership, and natural alignment with the TGG culture will complement our focus and growth in Denver and additional new markets.”
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT – EDUCATION
We pride ourselves on supporting clients across a wide range of industries. Recently TGG Senior Consultant, Keith McCarthy completed an engagement with a national education and child care provider supporting a customer experience and data structure initiative. Below is an engagement recap highlighting the type of impact our team makes in the education industry.
Can you give us an overview of the situation and scope of client engagement?
Our client partner was facing a significant challenge because the organization had a large amount of technical needs in order to access and strategically utilize the data sources they had from their customers. The client was in the infancy stages of building out a data environment that would help address this and they were looking for support and expertise to create the data environment structure, systems and metrics, and ensure accuracy and validity.
The foundational question from the organization was: How can we take our data and our different data sources, and build a strategic Power BI experience in order to help guide and inform our business?
How did you approach the work effort needed to support the organization’s goals for the project?
We started with a thorough thought exercise to identify what data and metrics were valuable to the client. What data points from their customers would provide the greatest insight and meaning to the different business units within the organization. For example: What are the customers’ pain points when trying to digitally interact with the company. The project sponsor also wanted to gain perspective on how, for non-tech savvy customers, the client could make the online experience easy to consume and interact with at a quality level.
One of the key pillars of the project was that the business had a variety of different data sources and systems in place. We needed to build a dashboard and BI experience that was able to process data from a variety of sources such as: finance, marketing, customer service, and operations. The new Power BI environment needed to not only be able to look at the data from a high level view but also be able to drill into greater detail as well.
The organization wanted to be able to learn, evaluate, and make strategic decisions for the betterment of the business both in the short and long term. There was a strong sense of urgency because the client wanted to be able to use the data to make decisions as soon as possible and there were new data sources that would become available and a new priority for the business that we would then need to incorporate into our new data system.
What was the outcome of the project? How is it helping the organization now? In the future?
The client ended up with a Power BI dashboard that provided the various data they wanted, in a view and format that was efficient to use and understand. The way we built the data environment also allows for the client to expand the sourced data and metrics in the future as well. Additionally, we helped train a new analyst on the client’s team in order to help them independently navigate the dashboard, data sets, and strategic functionality once our engagement had concluded. It was important to us to not only help the client with a meaningful solution, but also help equip them to sustain and execute the future moving forward.
As soon as we had completed the project the dashboard immediately started helping the client validate their data at a faster pace across departments and use the data to strategically identify with other teams (finance, marketing, operations, customer service) actionable steps to improve and maximize the customer’s experience with the brand.
By virtue of the industry the client must continuously be customer experience focused, therefore they want to add this data to their decision making process in an effort to make more informed and more impactful decisions.
What did you enjoy about the work?
I really enjoyed working with the project sponsor as they were new to the role and were really looking to make an impact with their broader organization and add value to their business. This created a fun and motivating situation to be a part of during the project. Helping someone else succeed is always rewarding.
Were there any personal takeaways or highlights from the engagement?
One of our Non-Negotiables at TGG is “Thrives In Ambiguity” and throughout the project when new data sources would surface unexpectedly or a new initiative needed representation, it was a great opportunity to pause, evaluate, and adapt in a forward-thinking manner. The opportunity to see our Non-Negotiables play out in real time was definitely a meaningful takeaway. The client also had a couple of tech capabilities that were new to me and it was fun to professionally expand my knowledge and learn these other tools and then analyze how to pull them into our data process.
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Our team at The Gunter Group has significant and strategic experience supporting education industry clients as they navigate transformational change. If your organization is interested in driving meaningful change in the education industry and beyond, we’re ready to help.
FROM OUR PARTNERS:
A DECADE OF SERVICE – JIM CALKO
The Gunter Group prioritizes and focuses on our “people first” mission, and it is with great excitement that we recognize Jim Calko for his 10 years of service with TGG. Not only is Jim one of our most tenured team members, he is also TGG’s newest Principal having been promoted to the position in the fall of 2022.
Jim was one of TGG’s earliest hires when he joined the firm in 2013 after serving for over five years in The United States Army. Jim’s service and leadership in the Army immediately added significant value to our young organization. Since joining TGG Jim has served in a variety of roles including: Consultant, Internal Operations, New Hire Ambassador, Manager, and Agile Services Lead. Jim’s experience and diverse background has been an impactful building block for our growth and success over the past decade. His ability to successfully drive change within various client organizations and focus on leading teams through digital and agile transformations has helped a wide range of client partners achieve their short and long term goals.
When asked about Jim’s time with the firm and promotion to Principal, Partner Tony Schweiss stated:
“From our earliest days as a firm, Jim naturally aligned with our goal to help organizations achieve success by delivering great work through building great relationships. He has been, and continues to be a great extension of our organizational culture and values. TGG is honored and proud to have Jim as part of our senior leadership team. Jim lives our non-negotiables on a daily basis and shares our drive toward personal excellence, building a high-performing team, and maximizing client potential through world class client service.”
We want to congratulate Jim on his 10 years with The Gunter Group, and we look forward to Jim continuing to help lead our firm as we work together to help our clients, consultants, and communities thrive!
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT – INSURANCE (Part 3)
We pride ourselves on supporting clients across a wide range of industries. Recently TGG Decision Insights and Data Services Manager, Ande Olson completed an engagement with a national insurance provider supporting an actuarial transformation initiative. Below is the third part of our industry spotlight, highlighting the type of impact our team makes in the insurance industry.
Can you give us an overview of the situation and scope of the client engagement?
Absolutely. Historically in the area of actuarial science over the last 30 years, a lot of work has been Excel based. The result is that actuaries often spend a lot of time copying work books, data tabs, and other tedious and inefficient steps.
Our client was trying to modernize how actuaries execute their responsibilities, complete their work, and identify elements of the workflow that could be automated across the enterprise. At the highest level, the goal was to free up actuaries’ time from tasks that can be automated in order to increase the actuary team’s opportunity and ability to provide strategic guidance to the enterprise. To get there, they recognized they needed to make not only process changes but technology changes as well.
How did you approach the work effort needed to support the organization’s goals for the project?
Actually, when I initially started working with the client I was brought in to work on a completely different project involving cloud automation and cloud tools. In meetings I learned the client was strategically looking at how the next generation of the organization would operate, with a focus on high performance and efficiency.
I offered additional support on this initiative as well because I have direct experience with the tools they were considering creating and implementing. It all started with a curiosity and desire to help the client in any way possible.
What was the work you actually did?
The first step was working with the project stakeholders to understand the vision and help shape the path forward so we could develop a proof of concept to show that a lot of the inefficient actuary work processes could be automated.
A big milestone in the project was when we built the back and front-end of the web application. We designed the application and I led a team actuarial developers to build the tool.
What was the outcome? How is it helping the organization now? In the future?
The initial release of the application is already helping actuaries efficiently valuate liabilities and assess claims impacts. Further releases will help price products and aid with long-term financial planning for the business.
Looking at it from just a time and value perspective, the processes we’ve automated previously took a team of two actuary modelers three days each to complete, but with the work we’ve done it’s been reduced to 4-5 hours.
The client is already experiencing an incredibly large efficiency gain, which allows the organization to more conveniently and effectively shift resources across business units when needed. As a result of the project’s early impact, we’re in the process of expanding the application beyond its current functionality, which is really exciting!
Were there any personal takeaways or highlights?
The work required on this project was about more than just delivering a great tool; it was about people, placing a premium on shared communication, and understanding a common vision and purpose. I was working on the business side of the organization but the engagement required a strong working relationship with IT, so building bridges and collaborating on the vision was critical for the progress and success of the project.
Another highlight throughout the project was how we constantly evaluated, refined, and maintained an agile approach. I wanted to lean into an agile team mindset where we were continuously delivering value and iterating on the project. I think this approach was key to the overall impact of the engagement.
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Our team at The Gunter Group has significant and strategic experience supporting insurance industry clients as they navigate transformational change. If your organization is interested in driving meaningful change in the insurance industry and beyond, we’re ready to help.
Industry Spotlight – Insurance (Part 1)
Industry Spotlight – Insurance (Part 2)
TGG CULTURE IN ACTION:
INCLUSION AND FLEXBILITY
At the beginning of 2023, we implemented a new paid holiday policy at The Gunter Group: we changed all our paid holidays to “floating holidays” so that our team can choose to celebrate the holidays that mean the most to them.
The genesis of our decision started last year when a team of our consultants came forward to the leadership team with an idea for a “Day of Service” for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. At the time, our holiday policy included 7 paid company-defined holidays plus one “floating” holiday, which could be used on any day during the year.
The team that brought forward the idea about the Day of Service also asked the question of whether the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday should be one of our “official” holidays. This led to a much deeper discussion about not only our holiday policy, but also Inclusion. In other words, how could we make it so that our policy on holidays would be fully inclusive and reflect our core values and Culture as an organization? Why should the company dictate that employees take off Christmas Day versus Yom Kippur, Diwali or days during Ramadan? Or New Year’s Day instead of Chinese New Year? Maybe the discussion about whether to observe a particular holiday was missing the point.
Our point of view is that Inclusion is not about a particular holiday, it’s about all of them. This is what led us to change our company policy so that TGGers can decide which days to observe based on what is most meaningful to them and their families.
Back to the Day of Service on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday: a large team of TGGers and their families came together to assemble and deliver 35 Sack Lunches, 20 Winter Kits, and 44 Hygiene Kits to the Blanchet House in Portland, an organization that supports people experiencing homelessness and that is “On a mission to alleviate suffering and offer hope for a better life by serving essential aid with dignity”. I am super proud of the team and the support they provided to such an amazing organization.
At The Gunter Group, we strive to create an environment to support our consultants, clients, and communities such that each can achieve excellence, realize their full potential, and thrive. We live by our Non-Negotiables: Collaborative, Integrity, Intellectual Curiosity, Thrives in Ambiguity, Emotional Intelligence and Grounded Confidence. Our Non-Negotiables reflect who we are and who we will continue striving to be. We value engagement and creative ideas from our team, and we are always working to make TGG a better and better place to work!
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT – INSURANCE (Part 2)
We pride ourselves on supporting clients across a wide range of industries. Recently one of our Senior Consultants completed an engagement with a large national insurance provider supporting a data integration and data vendor implementation initiative. Below is the second part of our industry spotlight, highlighting the type of impact we make in the insurance industry — featuring the work of TGG’s Frank Gleason.
Can you give us an overview of the situation and scope of client engagement?
Frank: Our client was trying to implement a data integration and connection project, and independently started the project early last year. However they weren’t making the progress they hoped or needed, and the initiative was stalling and losing momentum. The client brought us in, stating a strategic deadline for the project. The initiative, which involved both an internal team and an external vendor, was closely tied to business objectives, so there was a high need for clarity, planning, and a detailed timeline.
How did you approach the work effort needed to support the organization’s goals for the project?
Frank: The first thing I did was facilitate conversations with the business to identify and prioritize the actual requirements for the project and work effort. It was critical to develop clarity and responsibilities for the internal team, and drive alignment with the external vendor’s role and work effort. In order to reset and restart the initiative, and meet the organizational deadline, we had to build a focused, realistic, and accountable plan to get the project done.
After gaining foundational knowledge about the current status of the project, it was clear to me that each stakeholder would benefit from seeing and understanding how they were important to the overall work effort and business goals. To support this I went through each requirement of the data integration with the client team and prioritized the requirements based on the best value opportunity for the organization’s strategy and timeline. From there I created a detailed project roadmap that involved the internal IT team and the external vendor team. This additional step was critical to the project because it aligned and connected the two groups that were vital to the integration’s success.
What was the outcome? How is it helping the organization now? In the future?
Frank: The client wanted to reduce the amount of time needed to onboard new customer groups’ data sets in order to accurately and efficiently begin the billing process. Previously the process was done manually, which resulted in delays. The project reduced manual steps and created a streamlined process. Additionally, the initiative resulted in cleaner reports for the client throughout the process. These reports also built value for future-state planning analysis. In the future this work will help the client scale faster as the organization grows and builds out new partnerships and onboards a greater number of customer data sets.
What did you enjoy about the work?
Frank: I really enjoyed the people I was able to work closely with from the client organization and the external vendor. It was great to have the opportunity to work with both the IT team and the business team with such frequency and help move the teams and organization towards their goal. It was rewarding and motivating to serve as a bridge, if you will, and not only focus on a single part of the organization.
Were there any personal takeaways or highlights?
Frank: It was a great group of people and we worked hard to keep engagement high with the different stakeholders in a positive and collegial style. We maintained a great balance of a fun and timeline focused project which made the process even more rewarding.
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Our team at The Gunter Group has significant and strategic experience supporting insurance industry clients as they navigate transformational change. If your organization is interested in driving meaningful change in the insurance industry and beyond, we’re ready to help.
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT – INSURANCE (Part 1)
We pride ourselves on supporting clients across a wide range of industries. Recently members of our team completed an engagement with a large national insurance provider supporting multiple strategic initiatives. Below is an industry spotlight, highlighting the type of impact we make in the insurance industry — featuring the work of TGG’s Maddie Barbera and Daemon Heydon.
Can you give us an overview of the situation and scope of the client engagement?
Maddie: Our client partner was looking to streamline their organizational teams in order to better handle strategic actuarial modeling work across their product lines. Accomplishing this would also allow specific actuaries to focus on responsibilities that drive high level strategy and are more transformational to the business.
Originally the project sponsors thought they could have internal conservations and build everything out themselves but they realized there was more depth, detail, and complexity than they anticipated, so they requested additional support and expertise.
Daemon: The client identified that actuarial teams were each doing modeling, but the process being used in order to map out the modeling was being done differently by each team. Each of the models was also highly complicated in its own right and as a result of these two dynamics the client needed a language and continuity that wasn’t there at the time. We were focused on creating a bridge to span all the modeling teams so that anyone from any team could look at a process map and understand its various elements and information. Essentially creating a language for the organization that wasn’t there before.
What was the nature of the work that took place during the engagement?
Maddie: We started with an in-depth review of the current process map for actuarial modeling and templates, which was supported by a series of interviews and multiple meetings for each process map model within the organization. We were at the table working with highly talented professionals to help articulate their work and process in a way that other members of the organization could understand. And then taking it a step further by creating documentation for different groups if the needed documentation didn’t already exist.
Daemon: In a very consistent manner we were gathering data – inputs, process steps, outputs, and bringing to life a clear description of what team members were doing at each step in the different processes. We also wanted to help position leadership to be able to answer the broader question, “How can we continue to use this information to make strategic decisions in the long run?”
What was the outcome? How is the end result helping the organization now? In the future?
Maddie: During the engagement we collected and aggregated all the information the client needed in order to support their upcoming organizational redesign efforts. Furthermore, we summarized all the different documentation sources and created an easily accessible universal catalog source to centrally house necessary documents and process information for a variety of groups within the organization. These completed work streams will help position the organization to successfully undertake and execute their broader organizational redesign effort.
What did you enjoy about the work?
Maddie: I enjoyed working with the large cross section of actuaries and how it gave our team insight into different insurance product lines. It was great to be able to work with so many different members/groups of the client team and learn about their roles and responsibilities and how they impacted the organization as a whole.
Daemon: I definitely agree with Maddie and I’d also say it was really fun and rewarding to have other groups in the organization hear about the process modeling work we were doing and then want to see if it could apply to their specific area.
Were there any personal takeaways or highlights?
Maddie: I think a big highlight was getting deep into a multi-layered process within an organization and gaining and building trust with the client partner.
Daemon: Yes, and also being able to deliver something that will provide tangible benefit to the future of the organization was certainly a highlight as well. It’s always fun when clients immediately want to build off of a completed project.
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Our team at The Gunter Group has significant and strategic experience supporting insurance industry clients as they navigate transformational change. If your organization is interested in driving meaningful change in the insurance industry and beyond, we’re ready to help.
TGG RECOGNIZED AS A TOP AGILE SERVICE PROVIDER
We are excited to share that The Gunter Group was recently named one of the “10 Most Promising Agile Service Providers” by CIOReview magazine. TGG was identified through a nomination process for its ongoing and impactful agile work across a variety of industries and organizational levels. The recognition was part of CIOReview’s 5th annual Agile Edition of the publication.
When asked about TGG’s approach to agile initiatives, Principal Consultant and Agile Services Lead Jim Calko commented:
“We work to seamlessly develop the agile programs that impact the most important strategic initiatives for our clients. To achieve this we take a collaborative approach which results in consensus among the clients’ teams and leads their organizations forward with ease.”
TGG’s unique approach to supporting client partners’ efforts to transform elements of their businesses starts with a committed focus as noted by TGG Partner Matt Bader:
“Companies don’t seek to transform to become experts at agile, they seek to transform to better support their customers and achieve better business outcomes. Our firm places a relentless focus on our clients’ strategic goals by bringing agile expertise and experiences as a capability to help them get there.”
Read the full CIOReview profile on TGG here: https://www.cioreview.com/gunter-group
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Interested in learning more about agile strategies and practical recommendations – check out TGG’s Agile Blog Series:
- A Letter To Those Who Have Given Up On Agile
- Agile: Realizing Success Through A Pragmatic Approach
- The Power Of Big Room Planning
- The Retrospective And Keys To Success
- Velocity: Driving Towards Consistent Value Delivery
- First Steps And Helpful Frameworks
DOES TRANSFORMATION HAVE TO BE TRANSFORMATIONAL?
TGG Senior Consultant, Danny Quarrell recently supported a large client partner with a key Transformation initiative. Below Danny shares details and insights on how a mix of enablement projects alongside game changing Transformational projects are key to a healthy Actuarial Transformation Program.
Does transformation have to be transformational?
The biggest ongoing question in my first actuarial transformation program engagement seems like a trick question. Of course, it’s supposed to be transformational! It’s literally called The Actuarial Transformation Program.
Well not so fast my friend!
Rather than looking at an Actuarial Transformation (AT) program as a group of transformational projects, it should be viewed as a spectrum of projects that have a range of transformational outcomes. The end goal is transformation, of course, but each project contributes to that goal in different ways.
The projects that have the least transformative impact can often be the most overlooked and under prioritized projects in the program. Yet these types of projects are worthwhile (and even required) activities that create an opportunity for transformation where there previously wasn’t one and work to keep your community engaged. We refer to these types of projects as transformation enablers.
Transformation enabler projects will typically share these characteristics.
1. They free up time
2. They reduce risk
3. They are an iterative step on a path to a transformational solution
4. They keep the actuarial community engaged in the program
5. They build trust with the broader organization that leadership is actually committed to seeing a transformation through to actual transformative results
Before we get too far into our discussion, let’s be clear on what an example of a transformational project would be. Let’s say you have multiple groups of actuaries that rely on the same modeling calculation platform, but each team prepares their data (inforce data, assumption data, etc.) in their own way for ingestion into the platform and they each have different ways of storing outputs. Maybe one group relies heavily on Excel, another uses R and SQL, and maybe a third group uses MS Access. A transformational project might look like:
Building an enterprise-wide application that would allow each team to manage their inforce data, set assumptions and initiate model runs through a common interface and process. The application would also manage model results and provide robust tools for governance, controls, and auditing.
I think most people would agree that kind of project would be very transformational within an actuarial organization. It would reduce the time needed to prepare data and create the ability to produce multiple model runs in a shorter time frame, reduce risk, reduce ramp up time for actuaries rotating between teams, and streamline the governance process since all models would use the same processes.
Game Changer!
These game changing types of projects are the stuff dreams are made of; they’re also fraught with risk! They take years to implement, have high costs, require incredible levels of trust and engagement from your subject matter experts, and they can sink your program when they go wrong.
These risks are exactly the types of risks transformation enablers are meant to address. Let’s drill down a bit.
· Major transformational projects take years to implement and can easily lose momentum or fail to win the support of the people they are meant to help
Enabler projects can provide shorter term wins, keep the actuarial community excited about the future and help them stay engaged with the program
· Not every team is ready to be transformed, some people are just trying to keep from sinking!
These teams need relief, not transformation. They don’t have the time to stay engaged with the solution that you want to build and release 18 months from now. Give them the relief they need, then engage them on transformation
· Legacy processes are often fragile and have high risk. Process owners don’t want to exacerbate risk with change
Process owners for legacy processes know where their processes are fragile and where the risk lies. Iterative solutions can provide targeted solutions to these key areas. Lowering risk and the stress of owning the process.
· Legacy processes can benefit from being improved iteratively, and stakeholders are more likely to provide valuable feedback when given multiple opportunities via iterative solutions being presented
When you present iterative solutions that start by alleviating key pain points the subject matter experts and key stakeholders are more willing to engage on further improvements and accept greater change to the processes they own. Rather than asking for trust when you promise a big benefit down the road, earn trust by presenting small benefits now.
The actual enablement projects will vary from program to program and team to team, but the characteristics will remain the same.
1. They free up time
2. They reduce risk
3. They are an iterative step on a path to a transformational solution
4. They keep the community engaged in the program
5. They build trust with the broader organization that the leadership is actually committed to seeing a transformation through to actual transformative results.
New organizational initiatives pop up every quarter but the surest way to achieve collective buy-in is to make the real work visible, recognized, and a focused priority. A mix of enablement projects alongside your game changing Transformational projects are key to a healthy Actuarial Transformation Program.
At The Gunter Group our experienced team has decades of experience leading transformational initiatives for client partners. Our versatile team knows change doesn’t happen overnight and are ready to help your organization make transformational progress and achieve transformational results.