Vhi | IT Health Check

02 December 2019

3 min

Vhi is Ireland’s leading private health insurance company. They provide healthcare solutions for >1 million customers. Because Vhi is constantly developing new and innovative services, maintainable software system is key for their business.

The challenge

Delivering solutions that not only maintain and improve existing business SLA’s but enable future business strategy.
Delivering change in shorter timelines and as cost efficiently as possible.
Reducing the ongoing maintenance cost of applications.
Supporting concurrent complex projects.

Overall, the engagement with SIG has delivered:

Cultural change due to quality awareness
Increased functionality
- Reduced re-work and test efforts.
- Faster rate of improvements.
- Faster resolutions of defects.
Change in mind-set of developers and Senior Management.
Easier to add newly hired developers to the team.

Objective assessment of critical systems

Vhi commissioned SIG to carry out an objective assessment of their critical systems. The goal was to (1) determine t for purpose in relation to future business objectives and (2) determine technical risks. SIG conducted a technical risk assessment of Vhi’s major systems, achieved through scientific insights and benchmarking. The output of the above was to enable Vhi to develop a consolidated roadmap to meet business objectives and provide technical uplifts.

”SIG led a cultural change within Vhi, resulting in even more awareness that software quality matters. Our developers can now easily access up-to-date quality ratings of their work via our intranet on a daily basis.”

In addition, Vhi wanted to implement a robust software quality management system, since systems had evolved over decades, and in some cases involved external developers and sub-contractors. SIG enabled this by performing an initial software quality assessment and ongoing monitoring which lead to trusted product certification.

Inspired by the results of the quality management system Vhi offered their developers a training and certification program to become Certified Quality Software Developers. The ROI is stronger coding skills of employees, leading to maintainable software development. Result: satisfied developers, lower software maintenance and improved time to market.