TOPIC: Establishing a Requirements Competency at Great American Insurance

Great American Insurance Group is engaged primarily in property and casualty insurance, focusing on specialty commercial products for businesses, and in the sale of annuities, life and supplemental health insurance products.
In 2003, IT Services senior executives identified requirements as a critical “pain point” and a top priority for improvement, and established a Requirements Engineering function to address the problem.
At the time, IT did not have a standard process, techniques, or terminology defined for requirements development and requirements management. Predictably, this sometimes resulted in incomplete, inconsistent, and/or inaccurate requirements, which led to less than satisfactory results on projects.
The new function was charged to establish a Requirements Competency, in order to improve the consistency, completeness, and accuracy of requirements generated, in as pragmatic and non-disruptive a manner as possible. The approach chosen to carry this out was to develop and deploy a practical requirements engineering process and practices, supported by a skills development program and coaching support, and to automate as much as practical.
This presentation discusses how this was carried out, results realized to date, and how the implementation of the DOORS requirements management tool played a key role in helping automate the process and drive the organization towards requirements standards.

SPEAKER: Pete Carrion, Requirements Competency Lead, Great American Insurance

Pete Carrion is the Requirements Competency Lead for Great American Insurance (GAI) IT Services. Prior to this position, he established and led the enterprise Software Process Improvement (SPI) Program and the Specialty Division's software quality program (encompassing SPI, Quality Assurance, Configuration Management, and Testing). Before coming to GAI, Pete spent 20+ years in the U.S. Air Force, working in a variety of organizations and positions ranging from computer operator, programmer/analyst, software engineer, systems analyst, and project/program manager, to Director of IT. From 1989 - 2000, he also specialized in SPI using the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), leading organizations to CMM Maturity Level 2 and 3 ratings. He is a founding member of the Cincinnati Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) Chapter, where he currently serves as its Program Chair, and the Cincinnati Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). He has presented at SPIN meetings on several occasions, on both SPI and Requirements Engineering topics.

Presentation Link
Establishing a Requirements Competency at Great American Insurance