Company/Time frame: Virginia Farm Bureau (VFB), Richmond, VA February 2002 – October 2003
Position: Senior Project Manager
Project description: VFB needed to replace their aging manual cash and suspense system that ran on their mainframe with a new Cash Entry and Suspense system capable of handling payments going to their legacy PMS system as well of the new replacement system. Functionality was needed to do single check/single payment, multiple checks/multiple payments, splitting single suspense items into two or more items along with processing suspense refunds and JE items.
Challenge: This was top-down develop from scratch. It took two months to complete and receive sign-off on the requirements. Some of the terminology implied by VFB was not familiar to me or my developers. We also had to integrate the system to both PMS and the Billing replacement systems. I had a remote team of developers in Orange, CA, and Atlanta, GA supporting the development effort. We also had to develop and interface to VFB’s PeopleSoft GL applications. Finally, we had to support all lines that VFB wrote, either in their legacy system or the replacement system.
Action: I directly worked on the business requirements and become the subject matter expert for the developers. I developed the schedules, oversaw the development and testing efforts.
Result: The cash entry and suspense applications were delivered on time and on budget. This implementation was been described as one of the most successful at VFB. The applications have now been in use for more than 14 years and processes between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000 in payments each and every day. Virtually no bugs have been found since the initial implementation and the requirements are still more than 90% accurate.