Opportunities to automate labor intensive processes is near and dear to our hearts. The Department of Veteran Affairs presented us with an opportunity to automate a highly manual process that often resulted in significant delays and impacted team member productivity. Our team designed and successfully implemented an automated process to mitigate these issues and provide Veterans a far better experience and allow team members to focus on more impactful tasks.

Cybersecurity enhancements are often at the forefront of product roadmaps. We drove a cybersecurity product analysis and enhancement effort for the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) to ensure the VA has the latest and greatest capabilities. We developed an in depth roadmap for all enhancements and led solutioning sessions to deliver the changes quickly to production.

We served as Product leaders to our client looking to transform a core, fundamental process. We developed a multi-year product vision that aligned to the business vision, led ideation workshops, partnered with technology and business to define and refine features and stories, and created product artifacts such as customer journeys, storyboards and prototypes to articulate the vision. With a net new front-end and back-end to consider, we carefully prioritized work based on business value and speed to delivery.

When our client’s vendor contract required SMS functionality be released to Salesforce users in four weeks, we committed to achieve the goal. In 3.5 weeks, we established MVP scope, identified the pilot team, aligned on architectural design, and refined, developed and released all features. The successful release and adoption allowed us to gather enough information from the MVP to validate the business hypothesis and inform the longer term contract.

Mortgage Risk Management Division of a Global Financial Service Corporation
Phoenix was engaged to reinvent an implementation of a post-settlement audit automation product for one of our client’s largest customers. It had been nearly 2 years in implementation without going live. Phoenix assessed the state of requirements compared to team velocity and determined a major shift in product scope and approach was required to deliver value to the business in short order. Phoenix led requirements revamp sessions to revisit the core business problems and opportunities to be solved with the product. Phoenix devised an approach that focused on configuration first to provide immediate lift, and stripping out high effort, low value features. Phoenix delivered the first product iteration to production in 8 weeks.

After implementing SAFe, our client needed our technical and solution architecture leadership to drive the value of SAFe home. We led the coordination of architectural vision and strategy with the feature development of the stream, trains, and teams. Focused inward on the architecture team to build, train, and hire the right talent to expand the solution architecture team threefold. We had the privilege of leading internal initiatives in the form of objectives and key results to drive improvement beyond project scopes. Using architectural designs, roadmap development, PI planning, end-to-end testing, and writing software, we lead by example to inspire the teams to innovate and solve the hard problem with true Agile architecture.

Our client sought solution architecture leadership for a major intiative. We worked with teams to develop and deliver Agile architecture for a new product and business line for the client. A cloud-first approach with continuous integration and continous deployment, we rapidly developed the product from concept to proven value streams. The success of the effort led to the launch of their new software product and expanding the business. Our team lead the technical vision, strategy, and roadmaps for the development including assisting teams with database schema designs and service contracts. We collaborated with each team to help them see the vision and iterate on the design to deliver value with each delivery.

Seeking to solve client problems within the community banking industry, we were asked to provide our technical leadership and expertise to solution the most effective way for clients to integrate between software vendors. Our engineering leadership worked collaboratively with the clients business and technology representatives to develop an integration platform that effectively and efficiently solves the problem. These on-prem solutions bring process automation and business solutions to our clients, enabling their business and client sentiment to grow.

Our client reached out to us for Quality Assurance leadership on an implementation that spanned multiple products, a myriad of legacy systems, and integrations. The architecture was intricate and the ability to conduct end-to-end testing seemed impossible to some, but not to us. Built-in-quality is the name of the game and focusing testing efforts around business processes is checkmate. We supported environmental stabilization efforts, established cross-functional testing teams and partnered with our client’s teams to instill an integrated built-in-quality test philosophy powered by business centric testing and better value delivery.

We love the challenge enterprise initiatives bring and were excited to provide quality assurance leadership to a top enterprise initiative for our largest commercial client. With a short test prep and execution runway, we led the test scenario and case build out, end-to-end built-in-quality training, and support. With decades of testing under our belts, we facilitated in depth testing workshops to uncover critical scenarios and helped our client build out a comprehensive test strategy and plan. Gaining alignment across multiple teams is crucial and our folks broke through the barriers and developed trusted relationships with business partners getting us to a ‘one team’ mentality.

Midway into the USDA implementation of new Guaranteed Underwriting System (GUS), the Agency made a change to intake Fannie Mae Desktop Underwriter MISMO 3.4 v1.8.1 for easier lender and vendor adoption. At this time, Phoenix joined their efforts to handle End to End testing. Our team of experienced User Acceptance Testers (UAT) took the lead to create a testing strategy and plan followed by script writing, defect management, test matrix, executive reporting and gap analysis. Our partnership with Rural Housing Single Family Housing National Office (SFHNO) and the project team turned from End to End testing to full functional story testing. Within a year, we had the new and improved GUS system to Production. In the Phoenix way, we made sure Rural Housing SFHNO had the tools for continued quality UAT for when they would take those reigns.

The Veterans Administration Loan Guaranty (LGY) team needed to centrally collect, store and report on longitudinal loan data to better understand industry and borrower demographics. This deeper understanding of loan data enables more data driven decisions to service veterans with more with a higher degree of analytical confidence. LGY engaged with Phoenix Team as a supplemental workstream to an existing contract for modernizing their Loan Management system. As industry leaders, Through collaboration with partners, PhoenixTeam helped strategize and implement the needed architecture, infrastructure, integration and software to deliver the outcome. We designed and built an Oracle-based data warehouse that receives, transforms and stores data from multiple loan systems into a single source of truth at a single point in time. Our practitioners drove requirement calls and helped LGY business to shape data needs into actual software requirements for both modeling of data and front end visuals through Microsoft Power BI Dashboard tool. Utilizing and implementing both Agile and SAFe best practices through iterative development and requirement cycles, Phoenix produced over 30 Dashboards that focus on Lender and Servicer Performance, Serial Refinancing of loans and the actual and expected impact of the COVID-19 virus.

LGY sought our analytics support to gain automated access to end-to-end insights around their program. Given the highly manual loan file review process, only a small subset of closed loans could be reviewed at any given time. PhoenixTeam and our industry partners delivered a pilot initiative to enable API integration with lenders, collect transform and store closing data, execute both business and system rules, provide exception alerts, and build prototype of Dashboard using Microsoft Power BI. We facilitated and led discussions between several companies and divisions within the VA to engage with lenders and LOS systems, provide SAFe and Agile best practices for SDLC, provide industry standards and uncover requirements with business leaders to deliver a pilot system. This pilot enabled future work to automate the UCD file exchange between the VA and their lending community and provide analytical insights.

When VA Loan Guaranty needed a trusted partner to modernize their loan servicing oversight system (VALERI-R), they relied on us to plan, design, develop and deliver 508 compliant, custom curriculum to thousands of servicing partners and over 350 VA employees. In addition to the Virtual Instructor Led training through Adobe Connect, we partnered with the VA’s leadership team to record a series of 10 training modules to ensure new VALERI users had immediate access to critical training. This online training was supplemented with user access to a Salesforce sandbox where users were given hands-on exercises to reinforce the tutorial based training. Finally, we utilized Salesforce Knowledge to create a fully online User Guide which contains hundreds of Knowledge articles for VA and Servicer users. This training was instrumental in successfully releasing VALERI-R to production in 2019.

A major factor that differentiates Phoenix from other consulting firms is our determination to make sure our clients have the training and learning materials to support their initiatives. It was imperative that we provide the USDA with this knowledge support during its Salesforce Community and Government Cloud implementation. We provided fully customized training curriculum that is now required training for all USDA employees and their loan origination partners. Using Camtasia, we developed 15 Lender and 6 Employee training tutorials which included a knowledge check and certficiate of completion. Each tutorial was closed captioned and fully 508 Accessibility compliant. The training was written, recorded and released in less than 60 days, including client and 508 review. Our ability to deliver large volume, high quality training is a superpower for our training team and we were thrilled to be able to share our passion for learning with the USDA and their partners.

When a top Mortgage company sought training on how to deliver value at scale, with a focus on Product Management best practices and thinking, they trusted us with the task. With our experience in the software implementation and mortgage industry, we customized our commercial Scaled Value Delivery workshop to meet the client’s specific needs. This interactive, four-day workshop brought together participants with different skillsets through hands-on experiential learning. With a focus on realizing business value, we educate participants on how to design and communicate a vision, collaborate with team members across business, product and technology, and ultimately, successfully deliver value with little waste. We took the very best of product management, software delivery, Agile, SAFe, and change management to create and deliver what one participant called “hands down, the absolute BEST training I have received in 15 years.”

A top mortgage lender was struggling with identifying, aligning, and delivering continuous, incremental value. With the goal of helping trains and team of teams align on various technical approaches and value delivery, Phoenix implemented a Scaled Value Delivery Community of Practice, cementing the value at scale concepts. We helped teams put these techniques into practice by creating and following experiments and deep diving into specific topics of facilitation, product management, and Lean-Thinking. We facilitated feature writing workshops for Product teams, enhancing skills around refinement, and identifying and mitigating waste. Leveraging the learnings and feedback from training and coaching over the course of a year, our team developed a comprehensive year-in-review analysis of the organization’s value delivery and path towards continuous improvement.