Lewis Beard

For over ten years, I've focused on enhancing businesses by dissecting their processes. This involved collaborating with stakeholders and operations management to establish improvement objectives and identify suitable software tools to achieve them. Then, I encountered my greatest challenge: a company so deeply intertwined with a vendor that the identities of the organizations became synonymous in the minds and methods of both parties, leading to mounting complaints about the vendor's inability to fulfill their promises.

After a couple of years of attempting to correct the processes we had in place, I reached a breaking point and began advocating for a new in-house developed platform to replace the vendor's system, enabling the business to regain control of its destiny. The opportunity finally arose when there was a change in upper management at our company, as they recognized the same issues I did and permitted the project to proceed.

After successfully executing a high-pressure proof of concept by replacing one sub-system in-house, my design for the new system was approved, and we have been working on it since. Now that the project has matured and the company has undergone changes due to being acquired, I'm seeking my next challenge.

• WINDSTREAM COMMUNICATIONS - Norlight Migration, BA / Test Lead, Successfully managed a team of testers system migration, breaking the system requirements and migration needs into tangible test cases., Worked with users to facilitate creation of their test cases., Provided specific accounts and customer data to users for specific cases by creating custom queries against Oracle and SQL Server databases., Oversaw implementation day system and user testing to ensure a successful release.
• UCaaS Product Creation, BA, Worked with Product managers and Marketing to define product requirements for a multi-tiered, multi-group implementation., Became a product SME to facilitate design discussions from both a business process and system update point of view., Created UI prototypes to handle specific data requirements of this product to fit within the constraints of the existing data structure., Created and executed system test cases which involved entering data through the UI, and querying the database to ensure it flowed through properly., Guided users through UAT test case creation by demonstrating the UI changes and explaining the importance and usage of each data element., Ran system testing on release day to ensure initial implementation was acceptable., Provided post implementation support to “white glove” the first orders through the system to further ensure implementation integrity.
• Vox Systems Migration, BA, Provided guidance for product data mapping of source system products to destination system products., This included meta data elements, data typing, parameters mappings., Worked with the programming team to identify data sources for all relevant customer, product, and order data tables, supporting tables, and supporting meta data., Guided discussion on business rules for historical data requirements, and how such data was to be managed., Coordinated a data refresh of the testing environment to prepare it for construction, system, and UAT testing.

I've become a lover of the shooting sports, and continuing my training after having acquired my CWP in recent years. USPSA events at the local range have been a fun way to gain a new group of like-minded individuals, and improve my practical skills.