SUMMARY

• Highly accomplished and results driven leader with over 20 years of multi - faceted experience in Project management and IT development, Production Support and Quality assurance.
• Lead projects in both waterfall and agile methodologies. Skilled in building great teams and aligning their efforts with organizational goals. Consistent history of reducing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing productivity.
• Strong knowledge in commercial lines, personal lines and excess surplus lines of Insurance business. Lead and delivered Geo graphic expansion project and added 6 states to the Selective’s footprint.
• Excellent communication skills and can communicate to all the levels of the organization. Strong knowledge in PMBOK methodologies, SDLC, agile and lean software development methodologies.
• Dedicated to maintaining a reputation built on quality, service and uncompromising ethics.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Confidential, Branchville, NJ

Program Manager, PMO

Responsibilities:

• Planned, tracked, measured and reported on the status of a variety of projects throughout the entire project development life cycle.
• Managed production support vertical and worked with MSA vendor to oversee the production support activities in commercial line and personal lines of business
• Managed the budget for all the projects and provide financial analysis for any budget variances
• Published executive project status reports using financial and project management tools showing progress towards goals
• Created roadmaps for the Geographic expansion, Excess and Surplus UW platform and Insure tech program
• Created, tracked and inventoried tools, parts and materials used for corrective and preventative while operating within a project budget
• Developed performance and financial analysis reports which showed the effectiveness of meeting the project commitments
• Managed program cost, schedule, quality, performance and processes. Employed metrics, risk management and project management methodologies to ensure successful execution
• Played a major role in defining a road map for new region setup and created documentation with typical activities for new region setup
• Developed cost benefit analysis for the program and communicated to executive steering committee for evaluation and decision making for various product development phases
• Responsible for cost management and quality management process area in PMO and contributed in defining these processes for PMO
• Championed lessons learned process to increase the efficiencies and created a repository for all the projects
• Worked closely with development agile teams to create the release plans specifying release and program increment objectives. Managed the risk register and portfolio dependencies. Devised a comprehensive plan to manage the program increment objectives and goals including the dependency tracking
• Played a Scrum master role for one development to team understand the challenges and devised a plan to mitigate the velocity issues
• Worked closely with release train engineer to define the risk mitigation plans and dependency identification.
• Worked closely with product owner, business analysts and RTE to prioritize the backlog and identified the issues to maintain the velocity of the teams.
• Took part in the program increment (PI) planning along with release train engineer and tracked the PI objectives to make aligned with the project goals and benefits

Confidential, Glastonbury, CT

Senior Quality Assurance Manager

Responsibilities:

• Established new partnership with QA vendors to implement a variable onsite offshore QA Model
• Established new QA tools, frameworks, QA processes and best practices
• Established key metrics to show efficiencies, gaps/root cause, as well as daily progress throughout the test management phase
• Fully operational, QA costs represent 30% of IT development costs
• Managed QA improvement efforts to implement industry and proprietary tools, methodologies (i.e. SOA Testing, Agile, Automation, Iterative Prototyping and Configuration) and frameworks (Quality Center). Facilitating early detection of defects and greater traceability
• Directed automation test framework enhancements that increased test coverage up to 80% with up to 90% reduction in testing effort for rating and automated rule testing
• Directed regression automation test framework from a fully manual approach that increased test coverage up to 400% with up to 70% reduction in testing effort for commercial and personal lines
• Successfully led the quality assurance efforts for custom development and integration of advanced Insurance Applications (Managers Liability Insurance (MLI), Automated Renewals and Straight Through Processing)
• Successfully reduced the production errors (50%) and increased the operational efficiency and effectiveness
• Full testing lifecycle experience across multi-platform operating environments. Experienced in QA best practices and effective utilization of issue and test tracking tools
• Migrated ALM 11.0 to ALM 11.50
• Reduced the test data management effort by 60% and removed dependency on external teams for test data
• Managed the development, implementation, and refinement of test management and quality assurance practice within IT leading to the creation and execution of comprehensive test planning and the introduction of an innovative automated testing strategy. This effort resulted in improved project team communication, single point-of-contact test coordination, greater test coverage, better vendor management, improved metric reporting, and quicker time to production
• Responsible for schedule estimates, resource planning, ensuring test execution, defect reporting and resolution
• Developed, audited and reviewed test plans, test cases and user acceptance test criteria as part of the software development project process
• Established a Dashboard of reporting and trending metrics for both executive leadership as well as middle management