ACS RECOGNITION OF PRIOR LEARNING (RPL) FORM - 2019

SECTION 1 – KEY AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

Section 1 is based and will be assessed on the following document. Please ensure you read and understand - The ACS Core Body of Knowledge for ICT Professionals (CBOK).You must clearly explain how your experience and qualifications meet the selected Areas of Knowledge and specifically how and where you acquired the knowledge.You are required to select one topic from the Essential Core ICT Knowledge (Topic 1 or Topic 2) and one topic from the General ICT Knowledge (Topic 3, Topic 4 or Topic 5).Please ensure you address at least 2 subtopics from each of the topics chosen.

In the following expandable typing areas, explain how you have acquired your in-depth knowledge in these topic areas through your professional experience.

Please refer to the ACS Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) Instruction document for more detail

The ICT Key Areas of Knowledge:

SECTION 2 - RPL PROJECT REPORTS

The purpose of these reports is to enable you to demonstrate your command and implementation of the Areas of Knowledge described in Section 1 of this application.

Please refer to the ACS Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) Instruction document for more detail

Project Summary:
	Project Name	Start Date	End Date
Project 1	Authorized Provider Model Project – icare NSW	04/19	08/20
Project 2	Guidewire Applications BAU support and maintenance – QBE Insurance Australia	03/17	03/19

Project 1: Authorised Provider Model Project

1. Project Summary

1.1. Identification

Client’s Company Name	icare workers insurance NSW
Business Address	321 Kent Street Sydney, NSW 2000
Contact Numbers	Tel: 13 44 22
Web Address	https://www.icare.nsw.gov.au/
Email Address	https://www.icare.nsw.gov.au/contact-us
Nature of project	Application Development, Enhancement, Post-Production Support
Location of project	Sydney, Australia
Name of your employer	Cognizant Technology Solutions

1.2. Duration

	From	To
Total project duration	04/19	08/20
Your involvement	05/19	08/20

1.3. Resources

	Number
Your team size	12
Total project team size	30

1.4. Personal Involvement

Please list the phases of the project in which you were personally involved

Start	Completion	Phase Description
04/19	06/19	Requirements - Project Discovery, User story writing, Backlog grooming
07/19	07/19	Inception Phase – System Architecture and Solution Design
08/19	03/20	Sprints – Elaboration, Development and Testing
04/20	05/20	Transition (Regression Testing and Production Release - Implementation)
06/20	08/20	Post-Production Support (Go Live & Warranty Support)

1.5. Describe your role(s) and responsibilities in the project.

I was a Guidewire Claims Product Consultant in icare NSW for the AP Model – Authorised Provider Model Project. The Authorised Provider project extends existing Guidewire ClaimCenter applications so that third party providers (such as QBE, GIO and Allianz) can privately manage claims on the same platform, using icare’s operating model. This application is integrated with SalesForce, Onbase, Extreme, sitecore Portal, OKTA and SAP.

As part of this project, I was involved in user story elaboration sessions, estimating the user stories during sprint planning, solution design for the major features and user story development. In addition to this, I worked as a Technical Lead for the Guidewire ClaimCenter application and performed code reviews. I provided technical solutions to the offshore team, attended workshops to clearly understand the business requirements, document project discussions, and understandings in the confluence pages and JIRA tools.

I have been involved in analysing end to end integration flow for the proposed functionalities. I worked on solution design for the major features like claim allocation table, activity assignment rules, activity assignment rules, shared services, integrating ClaimCenter with Medipass for the invoice processing, document transfer. I have been involved in preparing the technical design documents and conducting code reviews for the user stories and triaging the defects in system integration testing and regression testing phases.

Based on my experience in the Insurance Industry and technical background, I have clearly understood the system architecture and the integration points. I was able to convert the Business requirements to use cases, provide POC (Proof of concept) upon the proposed requirements by designing, developing, and installing software solutions. I was involved in providing the estimates to the projects, factoring the cost and the efforts of resources involved in the project for each module.

The project team operated as an Onshore-Offshore model and I managed the team from Onshore and facilitated meetings regularly as a liaison to create a connection channel between the offshore team and the onshore team. I was responsible for planning and organizing sessions to meet system requirements, determine access groups of the application to enforce security constraints, and system designs and technical specification as per quality accepted standards. I was also responsible for writing, reviewing code and maintenance of software, end-user release documentation and relevant procedures.

I have created and maintained the business artefacts covering major features. I have developed Integration components of Applications with in-house and third-party systems through interfacing frameworks like web services, guidewire messaging and guidewire plugins. I was also involved in developing the solution for the submit invoice request and response, processing daily payment file from Medipass using Guidewire custom batch framework.

I prepared the Daily status summary report and published to the scrum master in daily stand-up meetings. I leveraged my insurance knowledge and Agile SCRUM experience in training the new joiners and helping them understand the Insurance domain and the Guidewire Claims System.

2. Business Opportunity or Problem

2.1. Describe the business opportunity or problem(s) this project addressed.

Historically, at icare for the Nominal Insurer Scheme had multiple Scheme Agents (Insurers), each agent managed claims on their own systems. icare has brought all of those claims (except legacy) onto a single claims platform, with a single Provider. This created lesser customer satisfaction as workers compensation claims processing time were increasing. In order to improve customer choice and satisfaction, the decision was taken to allow additional Authorised Providers to manage claims for some large employers. The Authorised Provider model project extends icare claims system and multiple Authorized providers can manage claims on the same icare claims platform, using icare’s operating model, while maintaining privacy and data security.

Another problem addressed in this project is Guidewire Claimcenter invoice handling, for the claim benefits/services were provided by service providers via through mail/email/FAX. These invoices will be processed manually that creates a sub-optimal experience for the service providers and increased administrative cost and effort on service providers and in claim handling process. A new payments capability called Digital Payments feature objective enables digital invoices coming from Medipass to icare ClaimCenter. Invoice payments could the be handled with real-time claim benefit adjudication using Straight Through Invoice Processing rules. This project reduces effort and costs associated with data entry and processing of invoices and enable staff to focus on more complex and higher value activities in the claim process.

3. Solution

3.1. Discuss your contribution to the solution, project or engagement.

As a Product Consultant – Technical Lead and a domain expert in Insurance (Property & Casualty), my contribution was present in all stages of the project.

Requirement Analysis: In requirement gathering and analysis, I Analysed User Stories, understood the business requirements and converted those into technical solutions. My contribution was towards researching, consulting, breaking the business requirements, evaluating system program needs, Impact Analysis and documenting them as Business use cases. I was also involved in identifying technical dependencies, and pointing out the technology limitations in the systems involved in the project.

Design, Development & Build Phase: As a technical lead, I was mainly responsible for planning, organizing the technical design sessions, preparing detail design documents, and data mapping between systems. I was involved in technical solution discussions, walkthroughs & reviews and provided inputs to arrive at design solution and documented the same for the project.

In AP Model project, I was involved in the solution design and development of the below components

1. Managing entity framework – Setup new managing entities for the authorised providers, setup new team structure and queues and setup security zones.
2. Claim Allocation Framework – Assign claim to managing entities and teams based on policy and segment.
3. Activity Routing Framework – Allow custom assignment rules and route activities to right teams based on claim managing entity.
4. Shared services team framework – Allow icare case management team members to access all managing entity claims.
5. Transfer document feature – transferring the documents from one claim to another claim.
6. Web service integration with Medipass for Submit invoice request and response design
7. Straight through invoice processing in Guidewire ClaimCenter by designing new workflow to run the rules in sequence.
8. Defined custom batch process for the transfer of inbound payment file from aws s3 bucket to ClaimCenter server location and archiving the file after processing the records.
9. Sending the processed payments to SAP financial system.

In addition to the above, I developed user stories by converting business requirement into technical solutions during development phase of the sprint. Furthermore, performing the code review and providing review comments to developers, i committed the code into the repository, monitored the Jenkins build and promoted the code to SIT/UAT environments.

Testing Phase: I was responsible for supporting Testing Team by unit testing, debugging, diagnosing the defects raised during shakedown/SIT/UAT/Regression testing phases. In addition to this, I corrected errors in the application using specified testing protocols, with appropriate guidelines and accompanying quality standards making sure that the application performs as per the specifications. This involved fixing Testing Environment technical issues due to Jenkins Builds, Data Modal Upgrade Issues and integration testing. Given walkthrough on the critical implemented functionalities and ensure them working as expected. I provided support to users while performing User acceptance testing in means of Data setup, Business scenario & workflow, Documentations etc. Participate in defect triage meetings and assist track defect closure with appropriate resolution and root cause.

Implementation & Support: I was involved in preparation of implantation plan for the Managing entity on boarded to icare claims system. I have supported production deployment activities along with Release Management team. Performed Technical Validation Testing (TVT) in Production Guidewire ClaimCenter application.

Correspondence & Training: I was involved in fixing the defects in training environment. I have prepared Business workflow documentation, prepared and maintained Application workflow documents and presentations, and presented to the team as part of training activities.

3.2. Describe any design or problem solving methods you used on this project.

I have been involved in the design and implementation and requisite multiple integrations in icare claims system.

Claim Allocation Framework – I was involved in the design and solution part of Claim Allocation framework. Claim Allocation is complex feature in icare claims system and for this problem I designed flexible solution to support complex business requirements. Solution was designed new page - claim allocation table in the desktop page of the ClaimCenter application. User hat to setup the data for a policy, update the allocation strategy and assignment type for each segment and managing entity should be updated. By doing this, claim allocation framework could be managed by respective authorised providers and flexible to change the allocation whenever required and monitored by icare team. Once claim was created in ClaimCenter, based on the allocation table, claim would be assigned to respective team and the right user. This framework supported future requirements of claim assignment when new scheme was onboarded to the icare Claims System.

Submit invoice request and response design – I was involved in the end-to-end solution design of this component. Invoice request comes from Medipass to GW ClaimCenter through Mulesoft, I designed custom WS-I web service to receive the request in GW ClaimCenter. After receiving the request, GWCC will parse the request XML and store the data into the database and send acknowledgement back to Medipass. For this invoice, system will invoke the workflow, using this workflow, straight through invoice processing (STIP) rules getting executed in sequence. After all the rules are passed, GWCC will create payment. If STIP rules fail then GWCC will create activity to process this manually. GWCC will be sending the invoice response status to Medipass using GW Messaging engine technique.

One of the Integration which drew significant attention was transferring and processing of inbound invoice payments file from external server location to GW ClaimCenter server location. I designed custom batch process to transfer the inbound payment file from AWS S3 bucket to ClaimCenter server location. After file transfer, I processed the file by reading and writing the records to database. After file processing, I archived the file into the archive folder in the server for the finance team audit purposes. I have implemented the technical solution for integrating Claims system and Medipass by leveraging distributed batch process framework design pattern. This implementation has optimized the file transfer mechanism from external system.

3.3. List the major deliverables of the project that you were responsible for or contributed to.

As explained in the previous section, I was part of complete phases in the software development life cycle(SDLC) for this project with deliverables in every phase of the project as described below:

In Requirement Analysis Phase, I

• Prepared high-level system architecture diagrams, Processed flow using Microsoft Visio Diagram and presented the same to Enterprise architects
• Prepared Impact Analysis, Requirement analysis and GAP analysis documents for the major features before implementation

In Design Phase & Development, I

• Prepared the detail design documents and implemented code for core modules like claim and activity assignment framework, shared services team framework, submit invoice request and response and inbound payment file processing.
• Was also involved in solution design and worked as a team member to deliver the proposed solution as per the accredited standards.
• Reviewed code written by team and provided code review comments in bitbucket
• Developed Integration components and POC (Proof of Concepts) for the new features
• Resolved the technical/functional clarifications raised by the Offshore team
• Provided the estimates to the user stories in story elaboration phase and in sprint planning
• Prepared unit test cases using Gunit classes

In Build & Testing Phase, I

• Performed root cause analysis and debugged the code for the defects which were raised in performance testing, SIT and regression testing phases
• Monitored the Jenkins builds and fix the issues if any builds are failed
• Performed code deployments into testing environments
• Worked with testing team for System testing and fix environment issues like pointing to right URLs for the integrations and runtime errors
• Developed a test data spreadsheet to validate integration points based on the contract between claims and other system, which was highly appreciated by my leads and clients.

In Production Implementation, I

• Was involved in the Production deployment of Authorised Provider Model project and supported for IT Technical Validation with test results and evidences.
• Monitored admin data load process
• Verified the database to check whether data is loaded correctly, after the admin data load,

In Correspondence, I

• Tracked the daily status of team’s stories development for every sprint and raising the blockers in the daily-standup/JIRA board whenever it’s required
• Prepared System Architecture Documents and high-level process flows and presented to the team as part of training activities. These documents were shared to the clients/ customers for their references and customers have highly appreciated on the same.
• Prepared & maintained technical and functional Clarification trackers and Work product review reports.

4. Results

4.1. Was your solution implemented? If so, describe the role, if any, you had in the implementation.

The solution was implemented successfully, and the Project went live. My knowledge on Insurance domain (Property & Casualty) and technical work experience facilitated me to work as Technical lead in the project. I was involved in Technical Solution designing the key features like Claim Assignment framework, Managing entity framework, Shared services framework, Document Transfer Module, submit invoice request and response and processing on inbound invoice payment file from Media. The solutions provided by me were implemented in the project as mentioned in section 3.2. In addition to lead responsibilities, I worked as developer and implemented few stories in the project.

Solution provided for Shared services team framework – As part of this project, icare team could view all claims managed by Authorised Providers. For this solution, I designed a new page in the administration tab and created one new managing entity named shared services. In this admin page, admin user could add security zone groups for all Authorised Providers and assign this managing entity to the care team members, so that these users can access all managing entity claims and support the claims processes to all providers. This screen was designed flexibly in such a way that new provider could be onboarded, or existing provider could be offboarded easily with minimal configuration changes in the system without any server downtime. For designing the solution, I received accolades from the architect and product owner.

This project also enriched my skills in deriving critical business scenarios and business cases. The framework which I developed during the project development using Gosu were utilized by other projects as well. This was highly appreciated by my leads and the client.

This project allows customers to select an authorised provider to manage their claims in a single, integrated platform adhere to icare’s operating model. Digital Payments Integration reduces the processing time of service provider invoice payments, reduces administration cost, increases operational effectiveness, improves & introduces new payment service experiences and increase transparency.

4.2. Assess the overall success or failure of the project.

The Project went live successfully, though we had to fix defects from existing claims application and requirements being added in the last phase of the project. The key objective of the project was to enable third party providers to manage claims on the icare claims platform using icare’s operating model. This project allows the managing entities to operate and provide a good customer experience. This project enables managing and adding authorised providers as simply like self-managed and configuration changes.

The successful implementation of the project was the result of a dedicated team with a focus on getting the job done in line with the project schedule. The project was implemented using Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology tailored to suit the needs of the organisation and deadlines were strictly followed. The initial solution architecture overview remained the directing document to the details of the development throughout the project. After the project Business Go-Live, no P1/critical defects been raised. Overall the project is successful and icare’s key objectives are achieved.

4.3. Lessons Learned

In retrospect, what you might have done differently on this project?

The major issues and lessons learnt for review and consideration are as follows: -

From Technical Perspective:

Undertaking Knowledge Transfer during project term, CCD and AP Model project development happened in parallel, resources shuffling between projects, working with reduced support from specialist development staff, Code Merge Issues – Running two code bases, KT for new team members were identified as impediments and corrective action were taken to resolve these issues. Automation should have some of the processes like code review, Recorded KT Sessions to increase productivity. This project helped me to understand the technical difficulties involved in COTS Product implementation, how to manage real-time issues under pressure, and work as team to implement the project successfully.

From Project Management Perspective:

During elaboration phase, some of the stories scope and complexity has been increased, due to that we had to perform re-estimation of stories. Daily stand-up meetings were held to make sure that there was no delay in the deliverables and remedial actions are taken to ensure the project is on schedule. Business SME was involved with major decisions about the project, product owner and release train engineer provided additional support wherever possible as requested.

Project 2: QBE BAU Application support and Maintenance

5. Project Summary

5.1. Identification

Client’s Company Name	QBE Insurance Group
Business Address	Level 5, 2 Park Street, Sydney, NSW 2000
Contact Numbers	Tel: +61 02 8275 9999
Web Address	https://www.qbe.com/au
Email Address	https://www.qbe.com/au/contact-us
Nature of project	Application Development, Enhancement, Maintenance, and Production Support
Location of project	Chennai, India
Name of your employer	Cognizant Technology Solutions

5.2. Duration

	From	To
Total project duration	03/17	01/20
Your involvement	03/17	03/19

5.3. Resources

	Number
Your team size	10
Total project team size	40

5.4. Personal Involvement

Please list the phases of the project in which you were personally involved

Duration	Phase Description
Monthly Release for every Calendar year	Requirements gathering and User Stories Writing
	Inception Phase (Design and Analysis)
	Sprint – Development and Testing (Development Sprints)
	Transition ( Production Release and Implementation)
	Post-Production Support (Go Live and Warranty Support)

5.5. Describe your role(s) and responsibilities in the project.

I worked as a Technical Lead for the QBE BAU Application Development & Production Support for the Direct, ANZ and CTP Guidewire ClaimCenter applications. I was responsible for delivering the application minor enhancements, incident code fixes and problem tickets planned for every monthly release along with Production Support.

As a SME in Insurance (Property & Casualty) & Guidewire ClaimCenter and BillingCenter expert, I have been involved in prioritizing User Stories and production incidents based on the business priorities, analysing technical dependencies, working with the Business Analysts to evaluate the functional requirements, and confirming the same for the release.

As part of production support, I was analysing the P1 and P2 incidents and identifying the root cause of the issue, resolving the incidents by providing temporary workaround or doing hot fix deployment to fix the issues without missing the SLAs. By doing this impact to the systems will be less. I was responsible for providing quick resolution to the P3 and P4 incidents and ensuring team also provided right resolution to the business users.

As part of application development, I have implemented new work queue for Direct Debit and Cybersource credit card payment batch jobs in BillingCenter to fix the performance issue. I was involved in conducting impact and GAP analysis and providing the solution for the major enhancements. I have conducted Technical Solutions meetings, discussions with enterprise architect team to arrive Design solutions. I have implemented complex work requests like Automated Subrogation Recoveries, Document hide feature in ClaimCenter and rewriting policy search feature in PolicyCenter. I was responsible for planning, organizing, co-ordinating and implementing user stories to meet business requirements in accordance with Guidewire Coding best practices.

I was mentoring and managing a team of 10 members from both Development team and Production support team in an offshore/onsite model while operating Offshore. I have provided the required trainings/ KT to the team members for handling Production Support tickets.

Furthermore, as a technical lead, I have prepared/reviewed technical design documents for the core modules, developed reusable components, performed code reviews (Manual & GScan) and conducted technical programs to meet system requirements as per technical specification.

In addition to the above, I provided support in User Acceptance Testing in terms of User access setup, Data setup, Business scenario & workflow, Documentations etc. I identified dependencies with third party applications support team and engage the required dependency team for seamless transition of developed code to Production environment.

6. Business Opportunity or Problem

6.1. Describe the business opportunity or problem(s) this project addressed.

QBE Insurance Group is Australia’s second largest global insurer, offers auto and homeowners insurance in personal and commercial lines and Compulsory Third Party insurance for the last 100 years.

As part of every release several business problems were addressed. I was involved in solution design and implementation phases for some of the key problems which had been addressed.

ANZ Direct Debit and Cybersource Credit card payment batch jobs performance issue – In Guidewire BillingCenter application, when invoice status changes from planned to billed, system will create payment request for each invoice. As part of this batch job, BillingCenter will allocate the payment for each payment request and this payment request will be written into a file. This file will be send to the bank to collect the payments from the customer bank accounts for all the invoices. This batch was failing when payment request count went beyond 8k requests on a given day. Usually this issue was occurring on 1st and 15th of every month and sometimes after long weekend as well. When QBE do not send these payment files to bank, these policies are going into delinquency status and letters getting generated. This creates confusion to the customers, which impacts the reputation of QBE in the market.

In addition to the above, two developers from production support team manually working on this task for 2 days and generate the file.

Policy Search performance issue – Whenever user searched for the policy with Vehicle number or insured name in Guidewire PolicyCenter, PolicyCenter server was crashing.

Automated Recoveries – In Guidewire ClaimCenter, QBE business wanted to automate the Subrogation recovery process and Subrogation financials to be calculated after the final payment is made on a claim. I was involved in the solution design and implementation part of this enhancement

Production Support (AM – Application Maintenance): Some of the Production issues related to excess calculation and due to special characters in the message payloads, messages were being stuck in the message queues.

7. Solution

7.1. Discuss your contribution to the solution, project or engagement.

As a Senior Guidewire specialist in this project, I was involved in the implementation of every monthly release and production support activities. I had developed and implemented Guidewire ClaimCenter in my previous project of a similar nature. Having domain expert in Property & Casualty Insurance, my contribution was present in all stages of this project.

I was mentoring and managing a team of 10 members from both Development team and Production support team in an offshore and onsite model and I was operating from Offshore. I usually connected with my team on a daily basis to review and manage resourcing part. I have provided the necessary trainings/ KT to the team members. I was responsible for planning, organizing, coordinating to meet business requirements in accordance with quality standards.

As part of Production Support, I performed following activities/tasks,

• Daily Health Check of Guidewire ClaimCenter Application three times a day and verify Financials Escalation batch, AP Extract batch and AP Response batch jobs
• Monitoring Message Queues and fix/resume MQs if any issues, Monitoring Batch jobs and monitoring logs if required
• Analysing the Production incident and provide the root cause analysis of the incident and providing quick resolution to business user to proceed with the claim process
• Creating problem ticket for the recurring production incidents and provide permanent solution for the issue
• Handling release management by preparing change controls and the related documents such as implementation plan, validation plan and Disaster Recovery plan, for various environments as stage, performance and Production.
• Deploying the code into the test environments using Urban Code Deployment (UCD) Tool

As part of Application Development, I have performed the followings,

• Designed and implemented a new work queue for ANZ Direct Debit and Cybersource credit card batch jobs to fix the performance issues in BillingCenter
• Understood Business Requirements provided by the client and estimating efforts required to complete the story and Interacting with offshore team, client calls and allocate work to the team members
• Understood the functional requirements of the user stories and prepare the technical design document for the AMEs and AD projects
• Assigned the AMEs to the team members based on the workload and conduct code review and provide valuable inputs to the team
• Developed and implement well designed code, test driven code as per the technical design specifications through Agile development methodologies
• Development of Automated Recoveries
• Supported for ANZ GW PC and BC Production deployment and fixed P1/P2 issues during the deployment
• Supported for CPT NSW GWCC application Production GO Live activity
• Performed point upgrade from 8.0.3 to 8.0.7 for the Guidewire BillingCenter and ClaimCenter applications
• Fixed recurring issues related to Excess and Subrogation problem tickets
• In addition to the above activities, I have prepared the WSR (Weekly Summary Report) for the incidents and problem tickets and publish the report to all stakeholders
• Highlighted any risks for the release with a mitigation plan for both Development and Production Support.

7.2. Describe any design or problem solving methods you used on this project.

As a Technical lead, I was involved in resolving critical (P1/P2) production issues and fixing major pinpoints facing by the business in ClaimCenter, BillingCenter and PolicyCenter applications. As part of Development & Production Support, we delivered 5 user stories in application development and 10-15 defect fixes every monthly release as a team from the ClaimCentr application.

I have implemented multiple design solutions in the project to fix the issues.

Solution design to the ANZ Direct Debit and Cybersource credit card batch job performance issue –The problem explained in detail in 6.1 section. For this problem, I designed the solution and implemented the code to fix the issue permanently.

Root Cause - As this batch process is a single thread process and taking around 12hrs of processing time the records and writing the records to a file the batch was getting failed when number of records more than 8k. Lastly output of the file was empty.

Solution - To fix this issue, split this single threaded batch job into 2 batch process. First batch process is implemented as workqueue which is multi-threading batch process to allocate the payments for all the billed invoices on a given day and update a batch process id and set status field to New for all the payment requests on a given day. Once the multi-threading batch is completed, batch scheduler will trigger the second batch. In this batch, this is single thread batch process, System will pick all the records with the status = New and write all these records into payment file and update the status to Final. By following this design approach, both the payments batch jobs were running successfully without any issues and this batch was getting completed in less than 30-40 minutes even when the load the was around 40k records on a given day.

Solution to the Policy Search Performance issue – As the problem is explained in detail in section 6.1

Root Cause – When user searches for a policy with vehicle number or insured name, system was loading all policies into the current session cache. Due to this memory leak issue, application server was getting crashed and no user could access the Guidewire PolicyCenter application. This impacted the QBE Policy business.

Solution – After analysing the code I found that there was issue in the code. To fix this issue temporarily, I disabled the policy search criteria fields causing this issue and did a hot fix deployment immediately to the production. To fix this issue permanently, in the next release re-implemented the whole policy search logic for all the different search criteria parameters for the Direct and CTP PolicyCenter applications. By doing this, this issue did not occur again.

Automated Recoveries – I was involved in the solution design and implementation of this enhancement. Solution is once the final payment is made on a claim, implemented new rule to create new subrogation object and set the basic details. After creation, I calculated the subrogation financials and sent the subrogation and recovery amount details to external system using GW EventMessaging technique. System would generate the subrogation financials document and send this to QBE Support Mailbox for tracking purposes. By doing, manual work was reduced and claims could be closed by the users.

As a result of fixing the above business problems, we were able to achieve the Guidewire PolicyCenter and BillingCenter applications are become stable, significant improvement in the system performance and no major critical issues had been raised.

7.3. List the major deliverables of the project that you were responsible for or contributed to.

As a Technical Lead and SME in Insurance (Property & Casualty), I contributed to the development and responsible for the team deliverables.

As part of Production Support, my key deliverables were as follows,

• Providing incidents weekly status report to Claims Application owner and providing the quick resolutions to the business-critical incidents
• Supporting the team in the product incident root cause analysis and helping the team to do the code fixes
• Supporting Monthly Production Releases and Post-Production configuration activities like admin data load and data change GOSU scripts
• Preparing and maintaining all project artefacts such as – status reports, Clarification registers, Test evidences, Release notes, Release Trackers, Defect trackers, Retrospect records
• Preparing end user documentation and operational procedures, Security - User access setup documentations
• Monitoring the message queues in Guidewire application and Third-Party Vendor applications. Reach out to the right team if any application is down and provide proactive communications/actions based on system outages
• Running the Claim cloner to extract claim from the Troubled database and loading them to lower environment to replicate production issue to derive solutions

As part of Application Development, my key deliverables were to,

• Provide the impact analysis and requirement analysis to the major enhancements
• Attend requirement walkthrough sessions with Business Analyst to get more understanding on stories to be implemented in the future releases
• Prioritize the application minor enhancements (AMEs) and problem tickets and add into the monthly release scope and track till delivered and tested successfully
• Prepare and review Solution design & Technical design for each AMEs and Application Development project enhancement, Organize and co-ordinate for Release Regression testing
• Mentor and Manage the team with required trainings, resources and technical solutions for all deliverables.
• Identify dependencies with third party systems, application support team and engage the team for support during Production Implementation of interfaces
• Prepare and maintain Release Tracker for every release and match it with Requirement Traceability Matrix to track all the requirements.
• Provide Support for SIT testing, UAT Testing and Regression Testing to promote code seamlessly to Production environment

8. Results

8.1. Was your solution implemented? If so, describe the role, if any, you had in the implementation.

The solutions provided by me for the Production incidents and application development enhancements were successfully implemented in Production on a monthly basis.

My technical work experience assisted fixing major performance issues on Payment batch file and in policy search performance issues. While getting the solution design to be approved by Enterprise architect, given multiple walkthrough sessions on the solution design and received approval from the enterprise architect team. Being a technical SME and with knowledge on Insurance (Property and Casualty) helped me to successfully deliver the monthly releases as a team. My proactive problem-solving skills helped QBE business to generate a high return on investment and highly appreciated by the client.

8.2. Assess the overall success or failure of the project.

As mentioned in previous sections, AMEs, AM code fixes and problem tickets were delivered on monthly releases. Solutions to ADs planned for that given month has implemented successfully into Production, though there were few minor defects and Warranty defects raised after implementations. These issues were tacked in Service Now.

Though, we had stringent SLA for Incidents, few Issues were exceptional, which took more time than expected due to data issues.

In Summary, Monthly Production Releases were successful and applications were stable without any P1/P2 issues. QBE insurance highly appreciated Cognizant Guidewire Application support team by making applications stable and on the overall successful delivery of Monthly releases.

8.3. Lessons Learned

In retrospect, what you might have done differently on this project?

In retrospect, we have identified that we could have prioritised the AMEs earlier in the development, which would have improved our productivity and performance of the team significantly. After introducing the early prioritization, in order to get a high through put and satisfy the business, we had to go an extra mile and deliver last minute items tagged for that release.

Overall the monthly releases achieved its objectives and can be classified as “most successful team” delivered on time irrespective of the high complexity.