Kathirea Somasunda

• Overseen platform evaluation (Majesco / DuckCreek / Sapiens / Guidewire) for Tier1 P&C carrier leading to decision making, implementation and support per client's legacy ecosystem, modernization strategies, timelines, budget and business expectations including migrating to cloud
• Drove successful Vendor transition phase for multiple clients with KT from incumbent to LTM on enterprise app support and services including legacy transformation and cloud migration
• Managing 3 Portfolios (1. Modern PAS, 2. Modern Producer Management & Commissions and 3. Document Management) across enterprise application for Tier2 carrier overseeing 120+ team members globally
• Amongst COTS platforms, acting as Majesco and Sapiens practice associate head at onshore within LTM overseeing multiple projects, budgets, timelines and risks
• Directed project managers on onboarding and offloading resources, setting goals, KPIs, performance benchmarks and monitoring execution, delivery, resolving blockers and managing escalations
• Hired, coached, offboarded, retained talents and run 1:1s to ensure alignment of IT strategy roadmap with organization goals
• Drove high-level strategic planning on modernization, development efforts across multiple projects to optimize resource utilization and shorten development times
• Worked on 360 degree feedback and continuous improvement
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to integrate specific AI based features into finished products
• Ensured compliance with regulations are met and overseen access controls, audits and managing data privacy
• Worked closely with client business and IT leadership teams, drove governance calls, participated in steering committees and overseen prioritization initiatives are per ROI and regulatory needs
• Translated business needs into system technical solutions
• Overseen life cycle replacement of hardware and software.
• Performed annual SME evaluation for Sapiens and Majesco practice PAS - Billing platform globally within LTM and did annual performance appraisal assessments to my team.
• Managed IT spends (software, infrastructure, staffing) and overseen optimized cost vs. performance
• Negotiated and overseen vendors. Reviewed SOWs, RFPs and vendor contracts.
• Overseen Go-Live orchestration, regular upgrades and DR drills for clients per annual plan

• Title: IT Application Modernization and Upgrade: Legacy to DuckCreek PAS - Billing application and integrations (Continuous ongoing implementation and Production Support) - Direct acc
• Platform: Duck Creek Policy & Billing platform
• Team Size: 75+
• Synopsis: ValueMomentum is providing core flex and managed services support (onsite production support) to RLI Insurance by providing business solutions, architecting, transformation and production support towards RLI's new enterprise PAS-Billing application
• Transformation is of multi-year program to continuously tranform LOBs from legacy to Duck Creek platform for by state roll outs and activities includes: requirements, strategy to design & architecture, development, testing support, end user training and Go-Live
• Support activities includes Focus to drive change, advise team on architecture, design, processes and technology to meet business needs and project execution in a global delivery model for implementation, delivery and support of Property and Casualty insurance products using Agile methodology, partner cross functional and technical teams, tools and platforms
• Work includes focus on aligning business needs with application delivery, planning / conducting techno functional sessions, analysis, architecture, design, estimation/review, solutioning (configuration vs customization), review, deployment practices, advising team on development standardization, processes, performance business process improvements, modernizing services (BizTalk to Kafka) per SOA based architecture and end-to-end production support
• Advising RLI in refining processes towards production support (AM/AME), release planning and other key areas per customer interest / needs
• Provide updates to client leadership team and stakeholders
• Manage offshore ValueMomentum resource based in India with work assignment, timesheets, leaves and performance evaluation.
• Advised and worked closely on Microsoft Azure cloud migrations and utilization of cloud services (monitoring, scalability and resiliency) as an Application Solutions Architect lead capacity
• Overseen legacy application support by coaching team till decommissioning / sunset

• Title: IT Application Modernization, Upgrade and Support for a Tier1 P&C Insurance Carrier (Specialty and Commercial lines)
• Platform: Majesco's Proprietary Insurance Toolkit (Policy, Billing and Integrations)
• Synopsis: Majesco is providing onsite support with platform (SaaS) ongoing implementation and support to QBE business teams (Underwriting, Billing and Finance) by having Product (Specialty and Commercial) roll outs in sequence for all states and support investigating the reported issues, clarifying / fixing it using Majesco's in-house tool kits (DevStudio, ICD, ICM, DocGen and JBEAM).
• Provided support to business team managers with solutions and work arounds on enhancements/operations that they want to do in system to better support their daily operations
• Provided support to efficient planning and execution of Development, QA and UAT phases on deliverables in helping teams understand the best development and testing ways, prioritization and releases to save time and quick roll outs with no compromise on capabilities and quality
• Provided complex platform change design and solutions to business need of converting Wholesale bill business to Broker bill business
• Provided solutioning, design, architecture and advising teams on enterprise integrations (Real time APIs), batch processing, data flow and transformation in this modernization and support space. Enterprise includes multiple 3rd party vendors, platforms and portals
• Provide support to internal/external audit on enterprise application
• Advised and worked closely with implementation and support as SaaS in Microsoft Azure cloud in the capacity of Application Solution Architect to meet cloud features and services

• Title - App Modernization (Majesco PAS-Billing Platform as SaaS Implementation and Support) for a Tier1 and Tier2 P&C Insurance Carrier companies
• Provided Implementation Architectural assessment and review
• Solutioning need assessment and business process understanding
• Focus to drive change in people as a change leader
• Advise on Business and IT process re-engineering & influence Business / IT teams to arrive at common consensus to conclude design at multiple occasions.
• Requirement mapping and bridging the gap between business & IT
• Conducting analysis (cost benefit and impact, etc.,) in ensuring investments align to business needs foreseeing future expectations
• Advise team with planning, execution and support at non-functional requirements such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, SSO and usability
• Ensure adherence to IT standards, best practices, security, compliance and regulatory requirements
• Advising team with solutioning, plan and execution on decommissioning legacy systems per business needs
• Reviewing and advising team on root cause analysis, data fix solution/approach and data fix scripts
• Advising team on troubleshooting production issues with ensuring teams to meet SLA timelines
• Advising support teams with best practices on monitoring application 24*7 and reporting
• Thriving for opportunities to innovate and automate business processes to reduce operational cost and improve efficiency with quality
• Collaboratively work with cross functional teams towards permanent resolution
• Advise teams related to maintenance of all environments (server space, services, DB tablespace monitoring, etc.,)
• Instrumental in Go Live roll outs and matching with monthly support releases, thereby meeting multiple business teams expectations
• Ensured business requirements translates to technical specifications (solutions, design and architecture)
• Ensures Risk Management, Disaster Recovery architecture, architecture and drill support, Monitoring & Tracking, and Process Compliance
• Provide weekly and sprint status report to Leadership and stakeholders
• Present internal and client management on mitigating technical debts and ongoing technical app health status
• Worked on multiple projects in parallel with no compromises
• Timely Escalation and communication
• Work in unison with customers, team members and all other stakeholders
• Onsite/Offshore resource management in my team: Assigning work, Guiding and Reviewing tasks done, and Resource management including leaves, timesheets, KRAs, performance appraisals, On-board and roll off team members, coaching and mentoring on career advancements, etc.
• Advised and worked closely with cloud team on implementation and support as SaaS in Microsoft Azure cloud in the capacity of Application Solution Architect to meet cloud features and services

• Platform: Majesco PAS - Billing (Platform Majesco's Proprietary Insurance Toolkit) for multiple Tier2 through Tier4 P&C Insurance Carriers
• Conducted demo, requirements gathering, foundational release phase, mapping requirements to technical specs, developing design, solutioning artifacts, integration specs and other artifacts for development teams to implement and support the clients.
• Worked closely with client Product owners from Pre-discovery to go live and support phases.
• Worked closely with various teams like sales/pre-sales, Gartner and existing customer capability requests to add emerging market capabilities on product expectations
• Valued and weighed the business value creating impacts and added identified emerging capabilities to Majesco product
• Advised Business Analyst, Development and Testing team to get the capabilities built
• Advised teams on planning, prioritizing and maintaining product road map
• Advised teams on continuous performance improvements to meet the market demands and customer expectations
• Advised teams on non functional requirements to have the platform competitive in market
• Advised teams on building capabilities foreseeing future implementations and support needs with less customizations and more configurable to ease use of app and quick roll outs

Title: Product Development (Majesco PAS and Billing)

• Developed multiple development artifacts and coding to develop the capabilities in Majesco PAS-Billing platform
• Been 1 of 5 team member to rewrite the platform in latest technology to meet emerging trends and industry expectations using Majesco's inhouse tool kit (DevStudio, ICD (Hibernate, YAWL and multiple apache frameworks, Jack Rabbit repository - Coding, ICM (Drools engine) - Configurations, JBEAM - Nightly batch, DocGen - Document generation, Oracle/SQL server - Databases)
• Built the capabilities with code in middle layer and thereby providing clients to choose any front end technologies and back end databases that fits them
• Did peer review
• Did version control management, build, deploy and releases of periodic base platform milestone releases per road map
• Worked closely with Product Analyst, BAs, QAs, Product Designers and Solution Architects.
• Supported multiple sales and pre-sales activities and demos to P&C Insurance carriers

Title: Product Development (Majesco Billing - proprietary tool)

• Prepared test scenario and test cases for the Billing capabilities identified to be developed from scratch in new technology
• Developed the test plans and priorities per product road map

Title: Production Support (Majesco Billing old version - Proprietary Insurance platform)

• Prepared test scenario, test cases for multiple Majesco production P&C Insurance clients
• Learnt the functionality of P&C Insurance industry across products, LOBs, Billing capabilities (Base platform and client enhancements)
• Executed test cases, documented evidences, updated tickets with QA approvals and attaching created testing artifacts
• Worked closely with multiple cross functional teams to meet the testing execution and completion on time with quality always