Admiral
Enabled faster, more effective business and technology delivery through lean portfolio practices, operating model design and cloud platform expertise.
The Background
Admiral, a leading UK insurer, embarked on a multi-year journey to improve the speed, quality, and impact of its business and technology delivery. Facing growing complexity across portfolio planning, agile implementation, and cloud transformation, the organisation recognised the need to build stronger internal capability while aligning teams more closely to strategic outcomes.
The transformation aimed to uplift delivery efficiency, improve governance, and modernise practices across its Product, Technology, and Agile teams — all while navigating a broader business agility evolution.
Our Approach
Sullivan & Stanley partnered with Admiral across multiple transformation initiatives, delivering targeted interventions that blended strategic consulting with embedded, hands-on support.
We initially provided Lean Portfolio expertise to support the rollout of annual planning — embedding new prioritisation models, supporting stakeholder coaching, and advising the PMO on tooling and funding requirements. This work also initiated the design of Admiral’s demand management process and laid the foundation for a more responsive and transparent planning cycle.
Building on this success, we were engaged to shape Admiral’s evolving Agile Operating Model — delivering a comprehensive uplift in capability, governance and engagement across Agile Release Trains (ARTs), product leadership, and communities of practice. Our consultants designed and implemented governance frameworks, defined product roles and training, and facilitated OKR alignment and strategy execution across teams. This included:
- Designing the Target Operating Model across chapters, component teams, shared services and guilds
- Facilitating PI events, retrospectives, and performance dashboards to drive ART effectiveness
- Delivering capability uplift for Product Owners, Product Leads and Squad Leads — including tailored training, R&R frameworks, and change management support
- Enhancing team engagement through gamification, expos, and innovation events like hackathons
In parallel, we deployed specialist expertise to support Admiral’s diversification programme, embedding GCP cloud capability to enhance infrastructure, deployment pipelines and DevOps practices. Our consultant worked closely with internal teams to optimise GKE configuration, improve platform segmentation, and support go-live readiness.
Throughout, our embedded team approach ensured close collaboration with Admiral leaders across business, technology and change. Resources included a Transformation Lead, Change Lead, and GCP Consultant — selected for their domain expertise, delivery track record, and cultural fit.
The Outcome
Driving scalable transformation through modern delivery, product capability uplift, and cloud-enabled agility — all while embedding sustainable change across teams and systems.
- Uplifted strategic planning through a leaner, more transparent annual planning and prioritisation process
- Embedded Agile operating model principles across chapters, ARTs, guilds and leadership roles
- Improved delivery governance through OKR alignment, lean PMO design, and performance tracking
- Stronger product capability, including role clarity, training and community development for Product and Squad Leads
- Higher team engagement, with gamified experiences, cross-functional expos, and innovation-led collaboration
- Cloud transformation accelerated, with improved GCP architecture, deployment pipelines, and platform governance
- Real-time knowledge transfer, capability uplift and ownership built across Admiral’s internal teams
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