TECHNOLOGY
Jeanette Hibbert FCIPPMSc, head of customer payroll/payroll product owner for Legal &General Retail Retirement Income, outlines the OCE project which received the CIPP 2020 Project of the Year Award Outstanding customer experience
A t Legal & General Retail Retirement (LGR), we’re proud to provide retirement income solutions that focus on people’s needs and help them enjoy a more colourful retirement. We offer annuities and fixed term plans, which provide the security of a guaranteed income – and with over 800,000 annuitants, the OCE (outstanding customer experience) project was one of the biggest payroll projects completed in the UK. We finished the project without missing or delaying customer payments. We proactively engaged our stakeholders, including HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), ensuring the changes have not impacted customers; this included tax reference change. Managing with robust methodology resulted in a successful transition from a legacy mainframe, with many challenges: hexadecimal code; mapping free text notes; thorough testing and moving from one system to two. The new systems are game changers, allowing Legal & General to service customers more efficiently, giving them more control of their own data. We’ve achieved this by outstanding collaboration between the project team, vendors and business, without losing impetus during the challenges of 2020. We achieved our largest migration to date, continuously improving all stages of the project: planning; requirements building; testing; migration processes and hypercare. This achievement was due to the energy of those involved, who were all committed to the success of the project. The project was instigated to implement new pension and payroll systems to process payments for our annuitants, starting with
approximately 350,000 individual retirement customers. The goal was to replace an ageing system that, although stable, used manual or macro workarounds due to complexity of payments and reporting. It used hexadecimal coding, and technical support had become limited. Using a payroll software provider meant LGR could focus on its value-added activities around pension administration, without requiring internal IT expertise and reducing the need to spend time with developers. Using Agile methodology, we had an architectural view of how the solution should fit with a wider project, updating and improving technologies and digital offerings throughout the journey. This included purchasing a scheme; managing a pension not yet in payment; activating payment, and processing claims for drawdown and single payments or, on death, moving the policy to a spouse or dependant where needed. Following the architectural review, RFP (request for proposal) documents were issued, and payroll experts were used to support the implementation, giving industry knowledge and experience to match the knowledge of LGR processes and products. Key themes were agreed as design principles: creating an outstanding customer experience; automation; innovation (rather than replication) and rules around mastering of data and processes. The external experts helped shape the solution as the design changed; switching from positive to negative payroll, reducing volumes of data flow between systems and significantly reducing the risk of non-payment. This has already proven to be extremely valuable. Our biggest de-risking success is the payroll
system running independently of our estate, with best-practice fail-over processes. Agile methodology means this was an iterative project, starting with a small pilot of standard low-risk customers to ‘prove’ the solution. Further migration population was dictated by development plans and first migrations and code drops followed the small pilot principal (including individual retirements, cash out plans, fixed term plans, payment of defined benefit plans). This meant we could manage challenges; piloted products could be migrated at a much higher volume once proven. We moved from 210 annuitants to tens of thousands per migration. Volume and penetration testing allows us to process at volume and protect customer payments, and we have more than 343,000 customers on the new platforms so far. Retrospectives are important to improve the process, including the migration weekends. As volume increased, we changed testing processes for data, moving from 100% manual audit to sophisticated reconciliation that focused on exceptions management. There were changes to how servers and applications worked during the ingestion process, reducing the waiting time during the migration. Streamlining has been important – processing payments every day means we have a narrow window during weekends to complete the migrations. Our focus is to reduce risk and enable automation and digital opportunities, rather than to reduce costs. Introducing new systems has resulted in reducing payroll processing to between one and three hours for one full-time employee (FTE), as opposed to a full working day for at least one FTE. This enabled a move to proactive reconciliations, meaning we can reduce errors. We process up to 184,000 customer payments daily, so need to react swiftly to changes.
...outstanding collaboration between the project team, vendors and business...
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2021 | Issue 68 42
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