The Importance of Agile Methodology in an Ever-changing Industry

Agility is the ability to move and act quickly, to think and understand quickly. We make it our business when problem solving to consider not just the problem facing the industry today, but also the forces that could influence tomorrow. Challenging problems require creative future-oriented solutions, and to do that, a product company must be nimble. 

Our software is built on a proven cloud platform that provides 24/7 monitoring of data centers that automatically scale and have fail-over mechanisms that secure and protect data as part of its infrastructure. We have honed our data model to enable configurability of our solution for quick maneuvering without the need for custom code. As a result, adding a new insurance benefit to our Claims Management software, or a new absence leave law to our Absence Management solution is quick and simple for us to deliver to our customers.  

Agility During the Recent Pandemic

The advantage of our agile approach to software development, our data model, and the Salesforce Lightning Platform has been evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies in the US were scrambling to support employees as the government declared a public health emergency, and non-essential services were closed. Employers and employees found themselves under pressure as childcare facilities and schools closed, COVID-19 spread throughout communities, and family members required care due to illness. 

Federal and state governments responded with new legislation that had nearly immediate effective dates. The industry and our customers — employers, insurance carriers and TPAs — were struggling to incorporate these regulatory changes into their absence management practices ahead of their effective dates. 

Our use of agile methodology ensured that we could configure our Absence and IDAM solutions to quickly deliver the necessary software updates to our customers to manage these new COVID-19 leaves. 

Without getting too technical, we were able to create new leaves quickly because of our data-driven approach to leave specifications in our Absence Management solution. The data model it employs, and the level of configuration means that the creation of Absence Specification records can drive the addition of new leaves. The recent development of our Custom Payment Calculator also ensures we can easily add configurable paid leaves. 

This Low Code and No Code approach to creating new leaves also simplifies the testing process since the risk of adding these new records is reduced from a code change to a configuration change. All of the configuration changes required to support COVID-19 legislation are bundled and implemented as one unit into each customer’s Salesforce instance, which dramatically reduces the manual steps our customers must make to get these leaves installed and working for their employees.

Our customers also benefit from business continuity. As companies were closing their doors due to the COVID-19 outbreak, our customers were able to transition to a work from home model easily. A number of customers have been allowing employees to work remotely part-time, which made the transition even smoother. Our agile team is also set up to work remotely, and  we are ready and available to help our customers with the transition.  

Our product development is agile and responsive. We are serious about user research, customer feedback and lean process design. We leverage these and our deep industry expertise to create solutions that deliver improved efficiency while enhancing the user experience. While this pandemic has thrown us all into a new sense of normal, we’ve been lucky. Our business model has allowed both our own business and our customers to continue operating during these unforeseen circumstances, supporting our mission to deliver solutions quickly to solve critical business needs.