Wendy Nelson

Acted as a Release Coordination Manager in Kaisers Claims department to meet both the company's goals and the government Federal and State regulations for the ROC Region (Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Hawaii, Georgia). This position included managing the deployment of various scheduled and unscheduled releases of code to test and production environments ensuring all testing, phase gate and SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) and requirements had been met before the code was deployed. The Claims team began to migrated to Agile and Dev/Ops methodology starting in 2021 and most applications where fully migrated by 2024.

• Managed code deployments to Kaiser's Claims Tapestry AP (Epic) and backend application. This application processed claims transactions for Kaisers ROC Regions Ensured the testing environments were code current for the test teams and the appropriate up/downstream interfaces where in place and functional.
• Managed code deployments for Kaiser's Health Plan Provider Data Mart (HPPDM) platform. This platform was developed to meet government regulations to allow outside entities access to provider data using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) technology.
• Managed code deployments for Kaisers Center for Medicare Systems interfaces releases to test and production applications. This application provided claims Medicare data to internal Kaiser DataMarts.
• Led discussions with development, business stakeholders, test teams and various technical teams (internal and external) to better understand the project timeline and testing environment requirements needs of a project to ensure that the various environments where available when needed.
• Created, maintained and posted in Confluence and Sharepoint yearly production release calendars for each assigned platform.
• Chaired defect review meetings to ensure that defects where being resolved in a timely manner. Coordinated work session to resolve issues that needed multiple teams to resolve.
• Created a detailed dry run/production implementation plans to ensure that all deployment steps and assignees where accounted for. These plans where then reviewed by all stakeholders and plan participates to ensure completeness. These plans included multiple teams both internal and external to Kaiser.
• Created the Release Content Go/No Go presentation for the Project stakeholders and obtained the appropriate stakeholder and SOX approvals for production releases via the Go/No Go meeting and ServiceNow Change record approvals.
• Created, maintained and posted in Confluence and Sharepoint yearly production release calendars for each assigned platform.
• Lead production deployment night activities ensuring that all code was deployed, validated and working as designed.
• Escalated production deployment night issues to project stakeholders as needed back out decision if issues where encountered.
• Managed Command Center/Day after Production Hotlines for complex deployments to ensure any unexpected issues where addressed quickly.
• Point of Contact for each platform's Disaster Recovery activities. This included review the DR plan making and revision and then coordinating the yearly test with the development team. Once the test was completed I work with the corporate DR team to complete the various reports need to receive an application “pass” for the year.

Lead various development team efforts for Common Membership investment team. This work included the managing the day to day activities for definition, development and testing tasks of investment and regulatory enhancements.

• Lead the Primary development team for the Medicare Business Engine (MBE). This was a 4 year Mega project which created some of the first System Orientated Architecture (SOA) services for CM to combine Medicare logic from three distinct Kaiser Membership systems into one application. This allowed Kaiser to standardize it Medicare processes allowing for a consolidation of staff and a streamlining of processes.
• Lead a team that redesigned the membership financial billing statements in the system to allow for better financial reporting for our accounting teams as well as a more user friendly bill for our members.

• Lead the Common Membership test team in the testing of code enhancement to the application.
• Negotiate and communicated various testing milestones for the team.
• Determine testing assignments within the team for each release.
• Coordinate national test efforts for the CM application, communicating project test status to various project stakeholders.
• Acted as the single point of contact for the coordination of National and Regional test efforts.
• Fostered Quality Assurance best practices with the team helping to develop testing processes that meet these goals.