Transamerica 'One Desktop' Initiative
Leading an enterprise Agile transformation to move Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) onto one unified desktop, with SDLC documentation that met insurance regulatory demands.
The Challenge
Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) were navigating highly fragmented, legacy systems to service complex financial and insurance products. The business required a unified "One Desktop" application to replace toggling between seven separate systems. However, delivering a system of this magnitude in a strictly regulated environment meant overcoming deeply ingrained waterfall habits, siloed engineering teams, and rigorous compliance overhead. One Desktop consolidated views across the company's systems of record, so it operated on regulated personal data throughout — PII directly, PHI in the linked systems — under enterprise privacy controls that had to hold through the transformation.
The Strategy & Execution
I led One Desktop as its Agile Coach and Scrum Master. The job was shifting the culture from rigid, phase-gate development to iterative, predictable delivery, while the SDLC documentation still met the insurance regulatory demands on the work.
The work ran in the spirit of the 5 C's. (Connect, Count, Capable and Courage are Bettner and Lew’s Crucial C’s; Choice is my addition.)
- Connect: Broke down silos by building one cross-functional team and embedding a top-performing call rep in it full-time. I translated between the rep and the engineers, so the team built for the rep’s on-the-phone reality.
- Courage: We went live with one of seven databases connected, during the company’s busiest season. Instead of hiding the gap, data from the six unconnected systems showed a clear “red not found” status, and features rolled out incrementally rather than in one delayed launch.
- Performance: To mask legacy-system latency, I directed the team to pre-fetch data on the initial load screen, catching most delays before the rep started the call and holding Average Handle Time targets through the transition.
- Feedback loop: In-app “Issue” and “Suggestion” buttons fed straight into backlog grooming, and reps could see the status of what they had submitted.
The Results
We delivered the first production rollout several weeks ahead of schedule, which allowed a soft rollout to 1,000+ users in December, before the January peak season. The project became the blueprint for Agile adoption at Transamerica.
One Desktop won the Best New Initiative award.