Radian – Sustaining Engineering
What are we solving and why?
Radian Group has a Financial Guaranty business located in New York City, NY. This financial guaranty business has provided insurance and reinsurance of municipal bonds, structured finance transactions and other credit-based risks, and has provided credit protection through financial guarantees and credit default swaps. The main FG applications include: Polaris, Atrium, Lynx, Pegasys, and Consents and Waivers.
Radian decided to focus on alternative revenue streams, but needed to maintain these applications until all policies complete their normal lifecycle. The team that supported these systems consisted of high-level Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who were both highly compensated and essentially single-threaded. Because of the expertise and trust placed in these SMEs, there was minimal documentation and process surrounding the applications and their support life-cycle processes. Because of the informal trust-based interactions with the business, business owners had no direct insight into the status of the IT projects at any given time. Radian was in a situation of critical risk, associated with unplanned employee attrition. Because the resources knew the situation, salary increases, high yearly bonuses, and retention bonuses became the norm and the costs to maintain these systems became unsustainable.
What is the solution?
Alliance provides AMO services on five main applications, Polaris, Atrium, Lynx, Pegasys, and Consents and Waivers, their corresponding Data Warehouses and several surrounding systems and databases.
Transition Services
Perform all the services required to successfully transition support and maintenance of the applications and the desired resources including knowledge transfer, documentation, gap analysis, AMO optimization, project planning, on-boarding and SLA refinement.
- Ongoing Support and Maintenance
- Analysis and 24x7 end user support
- Development of a viable, long-term application maintenance strategy
- Identification and recommendations for increased efficiency and cost reduction
- Execution of the CAST code analysis tool including remediation plans
- Maintain and improve existing service and quality standards
- Institutionalization of knowledge – corporate asset creation and risk mitigation plan
- System Enhancement and Development
- Requirements analysis, documentation, and standard development artifact creation
- Planning, designing, developing, testing, and implementing future enhancements
What is the business impact and value?
Alliance delivered a viable, long-term approach to application support and maintenance to:
- Increase the overall application performance and availability
- Maintain and improve upon the existing service and quality standards
- Fine tune resource levels and significantly minimize costs on a month-to-month basis
- Increase the overall budget predictability
- Allow for future resource surging, if necessary, to meet business needs
- Increased reliance on new corporate processes and less on key individuals
