Jon Thomas

Westfield Insurance was a small insurance company with an outdated website and lack of digital presence to their customers. This effort was created specifically to allow Westfield the digital visibility to interact directly with customers and offer additional functionality for billing, policy, and claims management.

Release 1 scope was primarily focused on the company website re-write. The company was in the middle of launching a new brand, and the re-write was critical to accurately reflect the brand voice as it was the first external promotion of the new brand. This included extensive user experience research, design, content writing, development, and testing.

Release 2 scope centered around the customer portal experience, which included the functionality to view a bill, pay a bill, view claims status, print insurance card, and view policy.

The final aspect of the complexity was the delivery method. The digital transformation was the first formal agile project at Westfield. This included a large amount of process creation, team adaptation, and executive counseling.

In the fall of 2014, North Central State College was looking for a new course to introduce project management to their students majoring in networking, computer information systems, or software development.

The course was built from beginning to end, including finding the appropriate textbooks, building the grading scale, development of the class projects, and finding in-class teaching materials.

The course is taught using 3 primary tools in order:

1. Theory
2. Implementation Examples
3. Practical Application

Over the last 4 years, over 80 students have completed the course.

Cardinal Health is a Top 20 “Fortune” company that distributes thousands of drugs throughout the United States. Unfortunately, the prescriptions drugs can end up in the wrong hands, and even negatively altered. The company used radio frequency identification (RFID) to allow tracking of all drugs, ensuring they were handled and distributed accurately.

This included managing the hardware upgrades of multiple warehouse operation systems.

The project was successfully managed and delivered on-time and on-budget.

The Westfield Insurance rating tools had code that was originally built 40 years prior. The company was badly in need of a new system that provided agents with the ability to receive quick quotes, with new products, and adaptability while quoting company policies.

The “Ratabase” tool was purchased, and this project included the implementation of all 10 auto states and migration to the new tool.

This involved leading a team of 20-30 resources while managing a 7 million dollar budget.

The team was encouraged to think and react differently while the schedule was successfully pulled in 3 months and the budget was still met.