Ed
Cwiertniewicz.

The problem

Client implementations were taking too long, which delayed the value clients were getting from the product. There were no standards for how a product went from idea to launch. The first portal I managed took a team of 10 more than 6 months, and it had only one module.

My role

Director of Analytics and Senior Product Owner. I owned product planning, release execution and prioritization, and managed a cross-functional team of 20+ across engineering, QA, product and support.

What I did

• Looked at the whole implementation process instead of one team, and found bottlenecks across planning, development, QA, client acceptance and production support.
• Worked with clients to pin down the KPIs and features they had in common, so we could build one product that worked for all of them.
• Standardized the SDLC and release procedures, and built the full story lifecycle in Jira with data governance, including PII/PHI handling, in every epic.
• Kept refining the process after each implementation.

The outcome

Over four years we completed 15 major implementations and cut implementation time by about 80%. Each new module went live in under 6 weeks with half the people, and clients could get new reporting features monthly instead of quarterly. Integrating advanced analytical models also cut data retrieval times by 70%.

The problem

Payment disputes took 30 days to resolve. The goal was to get that under 10 days with fewer resources. The older technology was only part of it. The bigger issue was that it created inefficiencies in the business process itself.

My role

Senior Agile Product Owner for the Payments, Billing and Complaints teams, working with the BPM (Appian) team to design and build new business processes.

What I did

• Worked with the teams to map the end-to-end workflow and find the manual steps we could remove.
• Built out the web services that hadn't been consolidated under one group.
• Moved the Payments and Complaints platforms to Appian with automated workflows.

The outcome

Disputes dropped to under 5 days, beating the 10-day goal. More than 80% of cases were automated and human handling fell by 90%. Payment processing time was cut by about 50%. The company saved an estimated $100K+ a month, and client satisfaction went up.

The problem

A major client portal transformation was first estimated at more than 3,000 hours and about 12 months.

What I did

• Instead of accepting the estimate, I worked with the clients and users to sort out which capabilities were truly critical.
• Built a feature map, prioritized the backlog, and broke the work into iterative releases.
• Worked closely with the delivery teams to identify dependencies and manage resources.

The outcome

We delivered the transformation in eight months using fewer than 2,500 hours, with all required features ahead of schedule.