Building a retirement income solution requires close collaboration between all the stakeholders.
Strong alignment between the parties – asset managers, life insurers, recordkeepers, managed account providers, and technology providers – is the ultimate driver of success for any retirement income solution.
In our previous blog post we explored how user experience can make or break any product offering. In this installment of our Implementation Playbook series, we focus on teamwork. For Micruity, teamwork is the foundation of our approach, and the cornerstone of growth and success for our clients and business partner’s initiatives.
Understanding the Differences: Perspectives and Practice
Building a retirement income solution is a collaborative endeavor that’s going to involve lots of different stakeholders, each with a voice at the table. They’ll come with their own teams and unique business processes, culture, and approach to problem solving.
As an infrastructure provider, Micruity typically assumes a role akin to Project Manager, at the intersection of all these stakeholders.
We think of every new collaboration or project like a new organization, and as with any new organization, you need to lay the foundation of shared success. That means having early and transparent conversations about what each team wants, how they work and communicate, and what their internal decision making process is going to be.
Those conversations become the project plan.
Document, Report, Assess, Repeat
After a project has kicked off, it is important to keep morale high and lines of communication clear. One of our favorite tools to maintain stakeholder engagement and momentum is the Weekly Project Status Update. You can think of the Project Status Update as the Top 10 Highlights (good or bad) from the project implementation that week.
The Project Status Update outlines each team’s goals for the coming week so that they can speak up if they aren’t on track to complete. This gives everyone an opportunity to communicate challenges that will impact other teams and timelines. We give kudos to jobs well done and recognize the efforts to get us close to the finish line. And we call out clients too, and ourselves, to ensure that there is ongoing ownership of agreed upon timelines.
It is important to keep in mind that the Project Status Update is compiled from several other sources of documentation that are part of the project including the Scope/SOW, Timelines and Milestones, Business Requirements, Software Requirements, etc. If a team doesn’t contribute to or maintain their other documents, the Project Status Update lacks a source of trust, and will have no value.
Our project stakeholders usually have several projects happening simultaneously, and so streamlined communication like the Project Status Update help us maintain alignment over long periods of time, enabling us to spot issues early, and course correct quickly.
Making Connections: Getting Tech to Talk (the interconnected nature of FinTech)
The stakeholders aren’t the only ones that need to communicate with each other. Our systems will need to talk to each other as well. And the rapid advances in software delivery can come crashing into legacy systems when it’s time to implement a solution.
Here again, early conversations matter. Teams need to discuss their different connectivity pathways and understand the short and long term plans for the solution. Is there an upgrade planned? Do we need a short-term bridge or a 3rd party that can optimize the connection? Having conversations is an opportunity to reduce tech debt and minimize the risk of latency in the product solution.
Partnership Matters
Retirement income solutions won’t build themselves, no matter how great the underlying technologies are. These are integrated solutions built by people and teams. At Micruity we have confidence in our team, and we extend that confidence to each and every collaborator that comes to our table.
Shared industry expertise is the only solution to the decumulation problem.