VladimirGoloborodko

Greenfield under hard constraints. A new insurer’s core platform on a roughly $7M fixed-price programme. The binding constraint was scarce Guidewire expertise, so I built a ~30-person core team around the limited experienced talent available and ran inception as one team with the client and Guidewire Professional Services.

Online sales went live five months after implementation start, followed by phone sales a month later and further releases during the year. The fixed-price programme then became a continuing time-and-materials relationship as the client internalised the operating model.

A stalled multi-vendor programme where the problem was the system, not the technology. Business units, internal IT, a prime contractor and our team were working under fixed-price commitments without a shared production cycle connecting demand to delivery.

I designed a common release model with fixed dates, capacity rules, prioritisation, entry criteria and explicit obligations for every party. Delivery became predictable, the team grew from ~50 to ~100, the programme reached ~30,000 users, the engagement economics recovered, and the client later absorbed the operating model into its own technology organisation.

Transformation through others. The largest programme in my portfolio, representing roughly a third of portfolio revenue, was loss-making and had a dissatisfied client. With the portfolio manager, I diagnosed the problem and designed the recovery model and the case for changing how the programme operated.

I joined the critical executive discussions as the authority, but the portfolio manager owned execution. The programme recovered. For me, the important result was that the approach had become an organisational capability rather than something that depended on me personally.