Dawn K. Josant

ASSESS is a platform built for the insurance clients of EagleView (EV) to help them expedite the assessment of insurance claims submitted by the property owners. The US and Canada geographies go through extreme climatic conditions and natural calamities like heavy rains, hail storms, winds, and hurricanes. The property owners reach out to insurance providers for claims after a natural disaster. The goal of the ASSESS platform is to provide support and expedite the claim processing. The EV drones are deployed to capture images of the damages, and the drone images are submitted to the ASSESS users for evaluating the damage. EV's computer vision algorithms detect the anomalies in images and help assessors take decisions over hundreds of claims a day, which is unlikely possible through a normal manual process.

As a technical program manager, I have managed a team of five technical product managers for the EV ASSESS platform. The insurance business unit of EV consists of 150+ headcounts, including engineers, testers, UI/UX designers, marketing specialists, and engineering managers. I had directly managed the agile release train meeting and the EAP and go-live milestones, thus winning more contracts for EV.

As a delivery manager for Hexaware Technologies (IT service industry), I was accountable for Lifetime Fitness Inc., a US-based fitness club. I was brought in as a technical project manager and architect to lead the business intelligence team, but I was given a bigger responsibility to also manage the other eight teams. My agile coaching skills helped plan and design LifeTime Fitness' agile transformation journey.

I educated LifeTime stakeholders and identified the change agents, coming up with a wave approach plan for agile adoption. I coached the critical teams first. Then I identified the scrum masters and product owners from Hexaware and LifeTime and coached them on the agile values, principles, and ceremonies. Inscribed the motto of #ONE_TEAM, which resulted in easy jelling of client and service provider.

Providing a safe environment for the team to experiment and innovate, we completed the entire transformation in 9 months, and we moved on to manage the bigger program by forming additional teams to speed up the market penetration.

The Client Enablement (CLEN) Tribe was brought in as a critical program to deliver the digital transformation for SBU retail banking. Although existing for almost two years then, projects were delivered through traditional waterfall methodologies, resulting in too many change requests, delays, and missing milestones. This impacted the plans for digital transformation and the customer journeys envisioned for retail banking by its managers.

I've joined to lead the CLEN tribe's agile transformation and program management. I used the initial months to train and initiate the tribe to the new ways of working methodology. I coached the product owners in building the product backlog and the scrum masters and team members on Agile concepts and ceremonies. I identified and kickstarted the various agile chapters and facilitated agile ceremonies for the tribe. The project also required me to lead the tribe in quarterly program review memos, big room planning, refinement forums, tribe showcases, tribe retrospectives, scrum of scrums, guilds, and chapters. I came up with a new workflow for Jira suiting—the nWOW, completing 81% of the tribe's quality deliverables for 2021 within budget and timelines.