Pankaj Raturi

BalanceProtector is an insurance product offered for credit cards. The project was to launch a new BP product. The product is offered at the point of sale and available for late-entrants during the credit card offer finalization and post-credit card sale. Clients can either call, visit a branch, or enroll themselves using online banking. They can also enroll in the product while activating the card online or on the phone.

Thus, all the source systems offering BP enrolment were in scope to be updated to present the new product. The processing applications, downstream reporting, and third-party insurer applications had to be updated and part of end-to-end testing. It was a challenge to ensure all the impacted systems were identified and engaged in detailed requirements. Being the lead insurance PM, I had to work with the PMs of different teams to manage the onboarding, budgets for each team and provide oversight to the execution of E2E testing and finally creating an integrated schedule and deliver using a phased rollout plan.

Many of these applications have their own release cycles. Navigating through these challenges to launch the product was a big success.

There was a program delivering a critical illness product and a change request to implement a sales tool that was approved to help advisors sell the new product. I joined the team as a PM to deliver this tool with a strict deadline and help businesses realize the new product's value.

There were three source systems involved, a vendor and a couple of downstream systems for reporting. Determining the impact, getting the teams engaged was the starting point. Aligning their schedules for E2E testing and release cycles was another challenge. There were several risks and issues around integration points. I stayed on top of all the issues and deliverables across all teams to ensure no delay. We were able to deploy the first phase of the tool with the product launch and then a follow-up release in the next two months.

The salesforce was able to use the tool to explain the benefits of the new critical illness product.

There was an end-of-life date for SQL 2008, after which there were extended support costs. There was a critical program in progress for the insurance compensation allocation application that had most resources working on it. We had a very brief window of time between releases where we could get few resources to initiate this upgrade project. Since we wouldn't get another chance because of the other program, we combined the Win 2008 upgrade as well, as it was coming to the end of life in the following year.

I took on the project due to the criticality as I managed the insurance program for safety and soundness. We got the business buy-in to get priority over the other program after presenting the business case. Business resources for user acceptance testing were made available. The app required extensive batch testing in two environments, pre- and post-change. We compared the outputs after each batch run, as this was the only way to do an extensive regression test in a small amount of time. I had regular meetings to stay on top of issues, risks, and defect triaging every day during the critical testing phase.

The extra rigors, diligence, and team-work paid off as we implemented it a week before the end-of-life deadline.