Development |
| Overview |
Pramerica Development is proud of our 10-year track record and commitment to our vision:
“Growth through Knowledge, Innovation and Partnership.”
Our investment in people and technology has enabled our department to grow to 228 staff as of December 2009.
The journey is continuous, and at this 10-year milestone,
we would like to take the opportunity to say thanks to everyone who has made our success possible
– our excellent staff, dedicated management team and collaborative customers.
Prudential is an excellent company to serve and we have had huge support
over the years. Outlined below are some of the significant achievements
that have helped evolve our people and our services since June 2000.
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| Knowledge |
Knowledge Management
Effective knowledge management and sharing have been critical to our success over the last
10 years and continues to be a key focus. The 'can do' attitude of our highly skilled
workforce has enabled Pramerica to take on some very large and challenging transitions.
Two notable examples are:
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Advanced Ordinary System, a large and complex legacy policy
administration system, was transitioned in 2001. This involved recruiting 66 mainframe staff
who travelled to the United States for application training. On January 1, 2002,
Pramerica became responsible for all AOS development, unit testing, development/QA
environment support, release coordination and production support. The first library
release in March 2002 was deemed a huge success by Prudential.
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Advanced Ordinary System (AOS) is a large complex policy administration
system that was built in the 1960's. It contains 8 million lines of code and 850 programs.
It is a mainframe system which uses a mixture of COBOL, assembler,
Job Control Language and SAS code. In January 2002, Pramerica
assumed responsibility for all application development, production support,
release coordination and development/QA environment support.
Over the last eight years, Pramerica has focused on knowledge management,
process streamlining and efficiencies that have enabled us to support the
application with fewer staff. Current headcount is 45 and the team’s
responsibilities have increased dramatically. Pramerica Development is now
responsible for the systems analyst function as well as extending environment
support to include user acceptance testing. Our dedicated team continues to look
for opportunities to increase value add to our Prudential clients.
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The Lotus Notes team has grown from five people in 2000
to a current staff of 39, an incredible achievement over the period. In today’s challenging
marketplace, companies require committed and outstanding professional services by people who
truly understand the needs of the businesses they serve. The Notes team strives to meet this
goal by providing a deep pool of Lotus Notes experts who deliver solutions that best fulfill
the needs of our clients.
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The Lotus Notes team started in 2000 with a staff of five employees on-site.
Since then, the team has grown to 39 members who are involved
in the ongoing efficiency of Lotus Notes and Domino environments.
Their work includes project management, analysis, design, development,
quality assurance and user acceptance testing, Lotus Notes upgrades and
migration, Web enabling, BlackBerry development and general administration.
Our staff is skilled in LotusScript, Notes Formula, R6, R7 &R8 features,
LEI, HTML, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL, CSS, DECS, SQL, DHTML, Notes Domino,
AJAX, JSON, Web services, Javascript toolkits as well as in the use of
middleware to integrate with Prudential applications.
Our active training programs ensure that our staff remains at the
forefront of the latest developments. Staff members certify their
knowledge by taking IBM examinations every year.
Client focus, responsiveness, flexibility and proven value-add
are key to our success and continued growth. We pride ourselves
in working to understand our clients’ needs and proposing and
implementing improvements and cost savings wherever possible.
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| Investment in People |
Recruiting the right people
has enabled us to build a highly educated, highly experienced workforce.
The graph below shows the average experience of our staff by role:
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A wide range of training is delivered each year to meet our
technical and business needs. Customized training courses
are also delivered internally by our technicians.
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Pramerica offer a comprehensive service to business groups including:
- LOMA's Fellow, Life Management Institute (FLMI) program is a
rigorous, 10-course, professional development program that provides
a comprehensive education about the insurance and financial services
industries. Established in 1932, the FLMI Program is the world's
largest university-level education program in insurance and financial
services. Our employees have completed 143 LOMA exams to date.
- 20 staff achieved their Project Management Institute accreditation.
Pramerica has developed an internal PMI group to share project management
(PM) knowledge and promote best practice PM Techniques across all projects.
One of our technical project managers received the prestigious Prudential
Project Management Council Award in 2006 and was invited to join the judging
panel the following year.
- Many technical courses have been delivered by internal staff covering a
wide range of technologies including mainframe tools,
testing automation tools and programming skills such as .net and Java.
- Professional skills such as communication, negotiation, meeting techniques
and consultancy skills are routinely provided for staff across all roles in development.
- Investing in management has also been key. All managers of people have completed
courses in performance management, retention, staff development, employee relations
and recruitment. The leadership team also attends such courses as 'From Managing to
Leading Others' and ‘Leading High Performing Teams.’ Our senior leadership team attended
the 'Excellence in Leadership program' and some team members are enrolled in a
Masters program in Innovation and Leadership.
- Four Pramerica employees became certified Scrum masters in December 2009.
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Mentoring: Mentoring programs are in place to help share knowledge.
- Technical mentoring programs facilitate staff moves between technologies and also helps ramp-up junior staff.
- Mentoring programs are evolving between subject matter experts in the United States and Pramerica analysts to gain a deeper understanding of the business and the applications we support
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Collaboration: Pramerica uses a wide variety of tools to help capture and share knowledge.
- Lotus Notes teamrooms and discussion databases are widely used to share information and facilitate collaboration between teams.
- Wiki is being used extensively for information sharing.
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Technical Forums
Pramerica Development has established technical forums in JAVA,
.Net, Lotus Notes, mainframe, UNIX and business analysis.
Members of these communities meet regularly to share knowledge,
tips and tools and to keep abreast of the latest developments
in technology. They also explore and research ways to achieve
efficiencies and improvements.
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| Partnership
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The Enterprise Project Information Center (EPIC).
EPIC has become the standard central project and finance management system used across Prudential.
The Pramerica Development Department has taken full ownership for the application and is now supporting
eight business units across the enterprise.
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EPIC provides comprehensive project and program management functionality including:
- Time management
- Project scheduling & estimating facilities
- Resource allocation
- Portfolio management
- Demand management
- Financial management inclusive of billing and invoicing capabilities
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Pramerica offer a comprehensive service to business groups including:
- Initial requirements review to establish a business specific start-up package.
- Assignment of a business analyst to work directly with the business group during start-up and future enhancements.
- Technical analyst support to identify how the application can best support business needs.
- Expert report developers to meet business reporting requirements.
- Infrastructure expertise and ongoing review to ensure application performance is satisfactory.
- Implementation and production support services
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The Gift and Entertainment Tracking System (GETS).
GETS was a significant project for Pramerica.
We successfully partnered with Corporate Technology Management
to manage and deliver this enterprisewide application.
It took approximately 10 months for us to provide the project management,
analysis, eDevelopment and QA testing for this project.
This was our first opportunity to implement LEAN concepts and
the Agile software development methodology from which we saw i
ncreased efficiency in the delivery cycle.
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Microsoft Partnership
In 2008, Pramerica became a Microsoft partner.
This was achieved by the work we have delivered using Microsoft technology,
customer testimonies and the numerous certified developers within Pramerica.
This partnership has enabled us to avail of technical help and training.
Through this partnership, Pramerica has also been able to learn the latest
technologies such as Visual Studio.
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International
In 2009 we expanded our support beyond the United States.
We now have strong ties with Prudential of Poland,
for which we provide Ingenium development support.
We have provided technical expertise to design, build and provide ongoing support
for Prudential of Poland’s intranet solution.
In collaboration with Corporate Technology Management,
we have recommended a design and infrastructure for Prudential of
Poland’s customer self-service solution.
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| Innovation |
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Blackberry: Our teams are leading the way with Blackberry development,
delivering company-wide solutions as well as producing coding best practices.
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The Pramerica Blackberry research team, comprising of resources across several technologies,
was formed to research Blackberry solution. Pramerica has successfully partnered with
Irish government agencies (IDA) to develop proof of concept solutions for Blackberry devices.
These applications can work in an on-line/off-line manner, and intelligently receive and send
data to and from the various enterprise systems. In addition to application development for the device,
various Lotus Notes applications have been adapted for Blackberry access.
Technology upgrades specifically in Lotus Notes Domino is providing a timely
platform from which Notes Web databases can easily be hosted on the Blackberry
at minimum cost. With all the experience gained in this space, Pramerica can
provide any mobilized application or browser based solutions for the enterprise.
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iPhone: The Apple iPhone is now acknowledged as one of
the most popular and easy to use mobile devices.
It provides a fantastic opportunity to give greater flexibility for
Prudential associates and customers to use their iPhones for business activities.
However, the standard iPhone configuration does not address the security
and encryption requirements for Prudential. The Pramerica Research & Development
team defined a solution that overcomes these issues and is working with Corporate
Technology Management to agree on standards.
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MyEclipse Blue
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Open Source: There are many potential benefits, including cost savings,
to using Open Source technology. Pramerica has partnered with Corporate Technology Management
to research and implement Open Source tools.
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MyEclipse Blue
Pramerica evaluated and piloted an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java development.
My Eclipse Blue provides features and capabilities comparable to the IBM Rapid Application Developer
(RAD) IDE. Pramerica partnered with Corporate Technology Management to
determine the viability and feasibility of using this solution throughout Prudential.
This tool provides a potential cost savings for Prudential businesses by eliminating
the need to purchase new RAD licenses.
Subversion
Pramerica researched and piloted Subversion as an alternative source control
system to PVCS version manager. Subversion is a mature and feature-rich
Open Source tool with commercial support and will be a cost-effective
alternative to PVCS when it ceases to be supported in December 2010.
Subversion provides a more efficient storage mechanism that reduces the
storage requirements relative to PVCS. It gives a better developer (user)
experience and increased productivity because it integrates with most integrated
development environments and issue tracking systems. It is a very
simple tool requiring minimal training to transition from PVCS.
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LEAN: The Development Department has championed the research
and implementation of LEAN principles across Pramerica.
Significant investigation was carried out on how LEAN can
benefit all aspects of the services we provide.
For our software development lifecycle, we have trained
resources in Agile technology and have qualified SCRUM masters.
We have planned Kaizen events to help streamline other business
process areas.
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Tools: The effective use of tools is critical
for efficiency in helping us deliver cost-effective,
quality solutions. In 2008, Pramerica Development
conducted a full tools review. Tools were catalogued
by technology. An assessment was carried out and the
best tools for specific jobs were identified for each phase of the
software development life cycle. In addition, internal experts who
serve as ‘go to’ people for queries have been identified
for each tool.
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iRise
iRise is a business analysis software simulation prototyping tool
that has proved very beneficial in facilitating direct
collaboration with the business and facilitates the requirements
gathering process. The following is a summary of the characteristics of
iRise:
- Prototyping and Visualization tool
- Used extensively for requirements gathering
- Allows end user to ‘see’ end solution before its built
- Fosters collaboration across all stakeholders
- Speeds up walkthroughs and approvals
- Simulations require no coding and are created quickly in a ‘drag-and-drop’ environment
- Changes can be made on the fly to reach consensus/sign-off with the stakeholder
- Simulations allow you to validate not just the look and feel of the application but also the data, business logic and user interaction
- Reusable components (masters & templates) help provide a consistent experience, standardization and facilitate future efforts.
- The document view in the simulations helps document textual requirements in context of the visual interactive simulation providing a more complete specification to the business users as well as the development and QA teams.
- Automated feedback allows users to supply comments on their own time regardless of time zone/availability of local resources.
- iDocs are self contained, fully functional portable versions of the simulation that can be emailed to end users.
- Simulations help move usability testing upfront in the life cycle and help guarantee the product delivered is in line with expectations.
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QAACE
Advanced Ordinary System is a mainframe application developed in-house by Prudential in the 1960’s.
Due to its size and complex file structure, data selection, reporting and manipulation were difficult
and time-consuming. Pramerica saw an opportunity to resolve these issues by developing a tool called
QAACE (Quality Assurance Automated Case Extract). This tool provides advanced,
flexible data extraction/manipulation functionality as well as reporting and code generation
functionality. It has been invaluable to both Prudential and Pramerica and has provided savings
in excess of $9 million.
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Teamstudio Build Manager
Pramerica recently invested in Team studio for the Lotus Notes division.
Team studio is a build automation system for Lotus Notes. It provides
a framework for structuring, managing and automating the build process
ensuring the application promotion process is consistent, reliable,
efficient and secure. It has built-in workflow functionality that will
enable us to capture the various approvals required for promotion and acceptance.
The tool is SOX compliant and provides a full audit trail.
The introduction of this tool in 2010 will eliminate manual builds and bring efficiencies.
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