Patricia Kelley

I facilitated the project team that created the original application through their prototype on iPads using iOS and Swift. I also supported back-end booking (AWS and DynamoDB ), data platform development, and an iPad application for store employees to use for the consultation. Finally, I accelerated the conversion from iPad to handheld mobile devices (iPod touch).

I managed the project and acted as a scrum master for a development team of 15-17.

Project Challenges:
• Unclear and changing requirements
• Team members that were new to the product
• An initial product that would not build in a production environment

I am incredibly proud of my team, who learned scrum, the production environment, and the software, and maintained good relationships with each other, and set an example of how to do scrum in the company.
The nature of the mandated changes required some extensive redesign of the system to meet the established requirements. The changes also affected multiple teams, which required a good deal of coordination and conversation to complete the work. At one point, the project was six months behind schedule, and it managed to catch up and release on time. I later employed several methods to catch up by adding resources, reducing scope, and working overtime.

I facilitated the story mapping sessions, coached the team on scrum principles, and facilitated all of the ceremonies to develop this capability. t was a very short timeframe and required data to be supplied by other teams which required coordination and extensive testing.
The team was being rebuilt at the time so few of the team members knew the mobile app they were adding capabilities to. My contribution was to find support and assistance for them and to remove impediments they came across such as lack of data. The team adapted quickly and helped each other. I was able to overcome the instability of the team and complete the work in time for the big release in the Melrose store. During this time the team had several conflicts with the UX design team. To fix this, I met individually with each team and then combined the two teams in a working agreement session to help each team understand the challenges they faced and build a healthy working relationship with each other. When working with the UX team, I employed lightning decision jam techniques to help them understand what their challenges were and how they could improve them.
I won the MVP "Do the Right Thing" award in the retail department for my work on this project.

When I first arrived, the team could not complete anything in a sprint. They had not completed any work for weeks. I came in and did team building, coaching, and shifted the team dynamics to achieve better outcomes. We also shifted from scrum to Scrumban to better match the way we were getting requirements.

This team weathered many challenges, from losing three different product owners to a turnover in developers. They experienced a lack of involvement from their stakeholders and a wall between them and the client. No one outside the team attended sprint reviews and we were forbidden from recording them. One by one, I worked with the team to develop innovative ways to overcome their challenges. I also gave several user story workshops, trained the product owners in story mapping, and worked with management to switch team members until we had a good mix that we were able to perform together. The team is now successfully executing Scrumban and delivering software that the customer is happy with, going from zero items completed to an average of 15+ per week consistently.

I led the development team and worked with the nurse designers of an initial pilot for pregnancy case management designed to save money and create better outcomes for pregnancies. This Blue Cross Blue Shield company was interested in piloting a way to reduce the costs of premature and difficult pregnancies for selected groups of their members.
I worked with stakeholders to develop a system that tracked the data for pregnancies and sent information to all mothers based on a survey and set high risk mothers up for additional case management. This product was so successful (saved more than $1 million in the pilot) that the company decided to expand their reach from pregnancy to congested heart failure, diabetes, and asthma. My team of ten people designed and developed a solution that was customizable for each different type of case and allowed the nurses who were setting up the case managment to tailor the survey questionnaires and response triggers for each type of case. This system was developed in Visual Basic with an Oracle back end.

I managed a team of 20+ people in completing an association mandated project to apply upgrades to the ITS and BlueSquared products. ITS is the inter plan teleprocessing system which is the mainframe version of the associated software that is used for BlueCross plans to send claims between the plans. BlueSquared was the client-server version of the software.
My main responsibilities were to manage all of the BlueSquared changes and various pieces of the ITS process. My teams worked in four states with three different mainframes. In order to satisfy the requirements partner testing had to be conducted with two additional (partner) BlueCross plans. Because I was an expert in the mainframe software, I was also an SME for those changes. Installation of the changes took about a week to complete and required extreme coordination within the plans to avoid creating issues in the production environment as we were completing the work.
I experienced many challenges including part-time resources that took a vacation over the installation weekend. I and my fellow PMs scheduled everything to the 15-minute increment and had online chats for the duration of installation to keep in touch with everyone.

I managed team members in three states in completing a security survey required to support the Medicare department of the health insurance company. The survey was mandated and consisted of 300-400 questions that had to be answered in relation to how the company was handling Medicare claims. The team members consisted of mostly claims managers and the process was largely manual. They filled out forms on the mainframe and once they were complete, we hired a temp to manually key the answers into an access database.
This was not the highest priority project for most of the team and we got behind and had several rounds of do-overs for the submissions. The temp we received who was going to manually key the answers was also a skilled developer who came to me and proposed that he code a process that would take the answer from the mainframe form and reformat and put it into the access database. I agreed to let him try it out and as a result, this project was completed a week early (for the first time ever) with the greatest accuracy ever and the sponsor was very happy.

I managed the final stage in the testing and implementation of a software product that was developed jointly by the BCBS company and a software company. I was responsible for executing the contract terms and holding the software company accountable for their delivery of the software and the conversions for the files to implement it. My development team of ten people was responsible for installing the software as we received it, testing it, and conducting training for the nurses who would use it.
The contract called for 75 nurses to do the user acceptance testing, in addition to training the nurses in the product capabilities. I also provided training to the nurses on the team on how to effectively test software. The software supplier was ultimately unable to provide the working software and conversion support within the timeframe in the contract so the contract and the project were canceled.