Raising requirements quality on an insurance platform
At Optiom, a Canadian insurer, I led requirements, process design and testing across departments — and helped cut UAT defects by 95%.
- Role
- Business Analyst
- Company
- Optiom Inc.
- Domain
- Insurance
- When
- 2021 – 2025
The challenge
What needed solving
Many departments, several core platforms — Claims, CRM, Seller Management and Policy Administration — and a strategic revenue initiative that needed a third-party payment processor. Every change had to be understood the same way by the business and by IT, and had to reach production without breaking a live web portal.
What I did
My approach
- Discovery: Led more than 200 requirements gathering sessions across multiple departments.
- Process design: Mapped current-state processes and designed future-state ones using enterprise architecture principles.
- Requirements: Translated complex needs into 1,000+ user stories, 100+ wireframes and workflow diagrams, with an impact analysis for each change.
- Integration: Gathered requirements for the payment processor integration, tested its REST APIs in Postman and supervised the implementation, with a focus on data security.
- Data migration: Designed and supervised an end-to-end migration across Claims, CRM, Seller Management and Policy Administration.
- Quality and adoption: Wrote test plans and UAT scenarios, supported QA, ran defect, change and incident management, and trained end users.
Deliverables
The work behind the result
BRDs and functional specifications
Traceable from business need to delivered feature, across the whole SDLC.
User stories and wireframes
1,000+ user stories and 100+ wireframes and workflow diagrams.
Test plans and UAT scenarios
Used by the QA team and business testers to sign off each release.
Standard templates
Templates for user stories, UAT and BRDs that made the whole BA team more efficient.
Results
What changed
UAT defects
requirements sessions led
user stories delivered