Product Owner, Business Analyst

LISA J. SHEFFAR *********@*****.***

**** ********** ***** ****: 330-***-****

Wooster, OH 44691

OBJECTIVE: Desire to apply my skills and knowledge in a professional setting while seeking to achieve sustained results and career fulfillment while contributing to a dynamic company.

SUMMARY: Experienced analyst with specialized knowledge in payment, insurance, and banking payment sectors

Proven track record in evaluating systems, assessing requirements, and enhancing functionality effectively

Ability to collaborate with various organizational levels, internal and external, including the ability to present customer perspectives

Demonstrated ability to explain difficult concepts to non-technical users

Payment Industry - ACH, Credit Card, Payment Gateways, APIs

P&C Insurance Industry - Agency Automation Systems including Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, and Agribusiness,

Guidewire Core Products: PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, and ClaimCenter

Financial Services Industry - Customer Service Systems including both Call Center and Help Desk Environments

Integrity, Results-orientation, Quality-driven, Teamwork, Self-motivation, and Client Satisfaction

Strong Analytical Abilities, Problem Solving, Detail Orientation, Multiple Complex Assignments

Agile Methodologies, System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Project Management, Project Planning, Process and System Improvements, Issue Resolution, Risk Mitigation

Business Analysis, Functional and Technical Design, User Stories, Use Cases

Test Coordination, Quality Assurance, Presentation and Written Communication Skills

CURRENT

POSITION:

H. W. KAUFMAN GROUP, Farmington Hills, Michigan (remote)

08/25 - current

Technical Business Analyst III

PRIOR WORK

EXPERIENCE:

INSURITY, Hartford Connecticut (remote)

Senior Product Owner (06/23 - 05/25)

Product Owner (03/21 - 06/23)

Billing as a Service (BaaS) - third-party billing administration system for Insurance solutions including credit card and ACH payments, invoicing, state-compliant legal notices, online reporting, commission distribution, and more.

Work on increasingly complex projects, design solutions, build project plans, negotiate priorities and timelines with product management.

Participate in quarterly PI Planning sessions to present planned objectives, identify organizational dependencies, and define integration points.

Perform scrum master duties including running daily standups, leading refinement sessions, conducting sprint planning, managing the board in Jira, and conducting retrospectives. Groom and prioritize backlog, develop user stories, and define acceptance criteria.

Become a subject matter expert and be able to demonstrate product capabilities.

Answer questions from the development team about features and requirements and serve as a point of contact between the team and outside vendors.

Analyze and document business and technical requirements, perform system testing as needed, and complete validation of the product at the end of the development cycle.

Manage the product development process by gathering feature requests, coordinating work to meet milestones, and implementing monthly releases using Azure DevOps.

Complete impact analysis of scope changes and prioritize production fixes.

Review incoming Salesforce tickets, prioritize requests, troubleshoot issues, and provide updates to customers.

03/16 to WESTERN RESERVE GROUP, Wooster, Ohio

03/21 Senior Business System Analyst (06/16 - 03/21)

Contract-to-hire (03/16 - 06/16)

Lead all activities for analysis and design for implementation of all Commercial Lines products (BOP, GL, IM, WC, Property, and Umbrella) providing quotation and issuance of policies utilizing Guidewire PolicyCenter.

Served as the primary liaison between the business team and analysts.

Documented functional and technical requirements as well as related processes to ensure all stakeholders have a complete, accurate, and clear understanding of the proposed solution.

Performed analysis of the most complex functionality in the system as well as integration and flow to and from PolicyCenter and BillingCenter.

Worked closely with developers to understand their needs and focus on building a quality solution that is maintainable going forward.

Assisted the Data Conversion Team with product functionality and data required to build and quote renewals in a new system that does not contain prior term data.

Coordinated scope and timing of testing to ensure QA receives functionality that has been reviewed by the assigned Business Analyst and meets the business need. Assist in analyzing issues and advocate opportunities to eliminate initial problems prior to moving forward in the testing process.

Provided Production Support to Underwriting staff for incoming PolicyCenter tickets.

In addition to performing analysis-related tasks, planned, managed, prioritized, and coordinated all tasks for other Business Analysts as well as mentoring less experienced resources.

11/05 to WESTFIELD INSURANCE (OHIO FARMERS INSURANCE), Westfield Center, Ohio

03/16 Data Analyst II, promoted to Data Analyst III in 2007

Managed all application-specific data for web-based software applications providing quotation and issuance of policies for Personal Lines and Agribusiness.

Performed complex analysis on legacy and relational data to validate business requirements. Translated business and system requirements into technical requirements and detailed design documents for proposed solutions (data, database, file structures, reporting applications, and data conversion programs). Determined impact of solutions to existing legacy and relational data stores.

Worked closely with developers to understand their needs in order to build a quality solution. Worked with data modelers and database administrators to coordinate the implementation of selected designs into test environments. Worked with testers to review and validate test results. Coordinated the migration of all data changes through test, quality assurance, performance, and production environments. Worked with architecture group and database administrators to ensure alignment with architectural direction.

Developed complex queries against data sources and compiled results for ad-hoc requests from business. Provided production support on an as-needed basis as well as technical assistance and troubleshooting support to other team members. Identified and analyzed data quality issues and advocated opportunities to correct problems.

In addition to performing data-related tasks, managed, prioritized and coordinated work streams for all application releases by determining which environments to use for development and testing and coordinating across groups for when coding and data changes will be complete and available for testing.

2/04 to CLIENT STRATEGY GROUP, Cleveland, Ohio

11/05 Consultant

Assignment: Insurance Industry - web-based software application provides quotation and issuance of policies. The application generates the required documents to list coverages, terms, and all legal disclosures.

Role: Data Administrator (10/04 – 11/05)

Acted as a shared resource across three projects to gather, build, load, and maintain data for existing states as well as new state rollouts.

Analyzed, loaded, and maintained State and Product specific data based on business requirements. Resolved testing and production defects related to database content.

Worked with DBAs and Developers to coordinate and implement database structural changes, data conversions, and movement of data between environments.

Built data maintenance tools in Visual Basic for Applications, document procedures, and trained other Administrators.

Role: Business Analyst (09/04 – 10/04)

Gathered requirements from company Subject Matter Experts (SME) and develop a requirements definition document for the Agency Production Record (APR) system.

Reviewed project goals as well as all available technical information, IT infrastructure, security information, business process information, organizational and other available documentation.

Conducted interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to obtain external, internal, fiscal issues, and legal considerations, functions and requirements necessary to support functionality, interface requirements, current and planned technical infrastructure and hardware requirements, security requirements, and support and maintenance requirements.

Tracked the business and technical SMEs who authored and contributed to each requirement and compiled the results of the interviews, including the information as an attachment to the final document.

Refined the current set of Business and Technical objectives to ensure the objectives accurately reflect the Business and Technical requirements.

Developed both an as-is description and a to-be requirements for APR, providing the high-level requirements for the business data, processes and technical environment for the new system.

Included an updated version of current documentation, updating Inputs and Outputs, users, owners, and supported personnel for the system based on gathered information.

Prepared the APR Requirements Document including the prioritization of requirements and identification of high-level use cases.

Role: Technical Analyst (06/04 – 08/04)

Provided analysis, organization, and management of reference data for a web-based application. The data is stored in a DB2 database on the IBM OS/390.

Researched and assessed the current database environment to document the “As Is” data model along with all automated procedures used to update the Personal Lines data.

Incorporated version control using ClearCase for all documentation.

Analyzed refresh possibilities of Rate Change spreadsheets from Production environment and provided recommendation to provide an automatic refresh of Personal Lines data. Developed the ODBC drivers to interface data to the Personal Lines Database.

Analyzed, designed and constructed new spreadsheets based upon table designs for users to input new Rate data. Built a refresh process for rate change data, generated sheets for all combinations of data, and documented process.

Role: Associate Project Manager (02/04 – 05/04)

Assisted in managing current release within a multi-year software project, defining and rolling out new functionality for its web-based application.

Maintained project financials (budget and cost database); updated work plan using MS Project and Project Server; oversaw time reporting; produced status and management reports; managed project issues and addressed change management.

Created the turnover plan for the application release based upon existing processes and templates; extracted required deliverables, presented the plan to the production turnover team, and gained written acceptance of the plan.

Assisted the project team with resolving data issues and documenting reference data.

5/00 to NATIONAL CITY CORPORATION, Cleveland, Ohio

7/02 Position: Project Manager, Sr. Systems Programmer, and Consultant; Officer

Lead the analysis and design effort for the monetary portion of a new Teller and Call Center replacement system.

Analyzed data and coded routines in Visual Basic to massage data for loading or for use in various tools (Rational Rose, etc.) and/or databases (Access, etc.).

Learned Rational Rose’s Scripting language and coded routines to enable analysts to gather requirements quickly during JAD sessions by creating Packages, Classes, Use Cases and supporting diagrams on the fly.

Estimated, planned, and managed projects for Middleware component-based development.

Researched, documented, and incorporated changes into the existing System Development Methodology (SDM) for Middleware component development as well as for Web development.

Facilitated the redesign of Intranet websites to provide awareness and increase overall usability.

4/92 to KEY SERVICES CORPORATION, Cleveland, Ohio

4/00

Position: Project Manager

Managed and coordinated all Nationwide Banking activities for the Call Center Systems area, the Regionalization of Great Lakes banks, as well as the conversion of loans to a standard corporate system (ALS).

Lead four major releases of the Total Customer Service (TCS) application.

Proposed and advocated enhancements that would be beneficial to the Call Centers as well as to the Private Banking area.

Planned and facilitated all upgrades to the Expert Advisor application for use by internal help desk areas.

Lead the integration of CTI functionality for the internal help desk areas.

Developed a comprehensive System Development Methodology (SDM) that provided a standard baseline for project initiation through post-implementation, consistency across all projects, and training for Project Managers.

Facilitated the production implementation of SEER Technologies HPS and Mediator CASE Tools by developing and executing project plans, performing contract negotiations and budgeting, coordinating staff and vendor activities, establishing development team and end user training, providing management reporting, and promoting awareness of the tools.

Position: Testing Coordinator / Quality Assurance

Facilitated integrated testing activities and implementation verification for all releases of the TCS application for the Call Center Systems area.

Facilitated integrated testing activities and implementation verification for a major legacy system (HOGAN) upgrade project for the Call Center Systems area.

Coordinated testing for internal standardization projects (Regionalization, Nationwide Banking, Loan Conversions, Stop Payments, etc.) across all banks (13) and processing sites (4) for the Call Center Systems area.

Performed analysis and management of domain values for the corporate information warehouse so that the integrity of data is improved and issues can be identified and resolved before they impact data quality.

Position: Senior Systems Analyst

Designed and coded user-requested and system enhancements to the Expert Advisor application using Tivoli’s proprietary language ASE.

Provided detailed analysis, conceptual design, and technical design for the integration of CTI into the Help Desk systems as well as collecting, verifying, formatting, and loading data for over 1000 branches and 20,000 employees.

Supported project teams using the HPS Development Workbench by developing procedure manuals, arranging and conducting training for new developers, performing production and testing environment maintenance, installing software, configuring PCs for optimal performance, and resolving technical issues.

Facilitated a LAN Conversion for over 100 team members by coordinating the conversion and end-user training, serving as the first line of support, testing and trouble-shooting software, providing problem solutions, and determining improvements to aid in future conversions.

Provided presentation services and project-related assistance to the Division and Department Managers to promote communication within the corporation and strengthen concepts presented to Senior Management.

Coordinated the publication of a systems newsletter by designing, constructing, and proofing each edition and then distributing to sites in Cleveland, New York, Maine, and Oregon.

EDUCATION: YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY, Youngstown, Ohio

Bachelor of Applied Science Associate of Applied Science

Major: Computer Technology Major: Computer Technology

Overall G.P.A. --> 3.27 (A=4.0)

Recipient of: Youngstown State University Scholarship

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