The Challenge
A leading specialty carrier operating multiple on-premises Duck Creek Policy instances sought to modernize its technology infrastructure to improve agility, reduce complexity, and enable long-term scalability. The client needed a strategic plan to consolidate its environments and migrate to Duck Creek OnDemand (DCOD), with a future vision of adopting Policy Active Delivery (PAD).
This effort required a modernization roadmap that would:
- Align with enterprise architecture principles
- Minimize disruption to ongoing operations
- Position the business for long-term innovation
Our Approach
Next Level Solutions began the engagement with a focused Discovery phase designed to gather a deep understanding of the client’s current-state architecture, operational dependencies, and long-term business goals. We engaged stakeholders across technology and business domains to ensure alignment, surface pain points, and uncover hidden complexity across their multiple Duck Creek environments.
From the outset, our approach was grounded in three key principles:
- Strategic Alignment: We worked closely with enterprise architects and business leaders to ensure the roadmap would not only meet technical requirements but also align with broader business and innovation strategies. This included identifying opportunities for simplification, standardization, and future scalability.
- Minimized Disruption: We knew that business continuity was critical. Our phased migration strategy was carefully designed to ensure that core systems remained stable and functional throughout each transition stage, reducing risk and avoiding operational downtime.
- Collaboration & Transparency: We maintained an open, collaborative working model with the client’s team, regularly sharing findings, validating assumptions, and adapting the plan in real time based on feedback. This built trust and created shared ownership of the final roadmap.
Key components of the engagement included:
- Comprehensive Environment Assessment: We analyzed the existing Duck Creek environments to identify duplicative configurations, technical debt, and upgrade-readiness across policy components.
- Tool-Assisted Manuscript Analysis: Leveraging our proprietary tooling, we conducted rapid, high-accuracy evaluations of Coverages and Forms, allowing us to produce detailed documentation and estimates without the long lead times typically associated with manual analysis.
- Scenario Planning: Understanding that flexibility is crucial, we modeled multiple migration paths and timelines. Each scenario was stress-tested for risk, effort, and business impact, empowering the client to choose a path that best matched their capacity and risk tolerance.
- Delivery Plan Development: Once a preferred path was selected, we created a delivery-ready plan complete with refined estimates, resource needs, and sequencing recommendations—ensuring the client had everything needed to move forward with confidence.
By the end of the 8-week engagement, the client had a clear, actionable roadmap for modernization—one that reflected not only the technical realities of their systems, but also the strategic ambitions of their business.
Key Outcomes
Phased Migration Blueprint
We delivered a comprehensive, step-by-step migration plan that addressed:
- Consolidation of legacy on-premises environments
- System remediation and dependency mapping
- Migration to DCOD and future PAD enablement
- Operational continuity at every stage
Flexible Timeline Options
We presented multiple migration timeline scenarios, allowing the client to choose the pace and structure that best aligned with internal capacity and strategic priorities.
Execution-Ready Planning
The client received a fully developed, actionable project plan complete with refined effort estimates to support resource planning, budgeting, and delivery readiness.