Prudential says it has improved the productivity of its
software development by 5% to 7% after achieving a process quality
benchmark.
The firm is the first UK insurer to reach level 2 of the
Capability Maturity Model Integration, which assesses planning,
management and quality assurance of IT programmes.
Prudential won the accreditation following an external
assessment by Gartner after an 11-month drive to improve its
product management processes.
“We had to show we knew whether our projects were on time and on
budget and that we were managing risks, week to week and month to
month,” said Colin Wileman, deputy chief information officer.
Prudential, which has 450 software developers, said preparing
for the accreditation had helped it reduce the number of serious
errors in code.
“For most of the past six months we have been running at below
three severity 1 level errors a month,” said Wileman.
The insurer is preparing a business case for a severity level 3
assessment. CMMI offers five levels of assessment, which require
increasingly stringent process controls.