We interviewed Ahmed Kourki, IT project manager at Berexia, about his most complex project within our company. Find out about the challenges he faced and his expert advice.
What was your most complex project and why?
“Without hesitation: the Alpha project.
It was complex by nature, scope, and ambition. It combined a strong business dimension (reinsurance), high data complexity, and international organizational constraints that are rarely found in a single project.”
Can you briefly describe the project?
“Alpha is a project to manage and supervise reinsurance contracts for one of the world leaders in the sector.
The objective was clear: to regain control and visibility over thousands of contracts managed by MGAs (Managing General Agencies) and TPAs (Third-Party Administrators), responsible for generating premiums and processing claims, across five continents.
The solution had to enable:
- accurate tracking of premiums generated per contract,
- analysis of associated claims,
- management of highly specific contractual configurations, unique to each program, country, and insurance branch.”
What made it particularly complex compared to your other projects?
“There were several layers of complexity:
- extreme heterogeneity of reinsurance contracts, sometimes unique in their structure,
- different business rules depending on the country and line of business,
- a multiplicity of players (internal lines of business, MGAs, TPAs) with highly variable visions, regulatory constraints, and IT maturity.
It wasn’t “one project,” but a constellation of projects intertwined in a single platform.”
What was the most difficult constraint to manage?
“The first major constraint was data.
We had to create a common data dictionary to unify the language of insurance across countries, branches, and partners, an essential prerequisite for comparison, control, and management.
The second constraint was time-to-market: delivering quickly while respecting the group’s strategic vision and market pressure.”
What was the concrete impact of this constraint on the project?
“These constraints had a direct impact on:
- the schedule, with constant trade-offs;
- the scope, which had to remain flexible without losing consistency;
- the teams, which had to be both highly skilled and extremely adaptable.
The budget, organization, and priorities had to be continuously adjusted.”
Looking back, what would you do differently today?
“I would place even greater emphasis on:
- formalizing the data dictionary from the outset,
- more industrialized contractual onboarding,
- and faster acculturation of teams to the subtleties of international reinsurance.
Saving time at the beginning means saving a lot of time at the end.”
Any lessons or advice to remember when managing a complex IT project?
“Complexity cannot be fought, it must be structured.
In a complex IT project:
- data is a strategic asset, not a by-product,
- business-IT alignment is vital,
- and human skills often make the difference before technology.
Finally, an international project is not only managed with tools, but with listening, teaching, and a lot of pragmatism.”
