What is the most innovative idea you have ever had? How did you come up with it and how did you go about implementing it?

The most innovative idea I've ever had was to utilize check system when completing payment via check when starting a new policy.  When you accept a payment that is not a secured form of payment such as credit card or western union, depending on the state you are required to provide insurance based on the state regulations.  For example NY requires the company to send out a cancelation letter which gives an additional 14 days to make the payment.  

During planning season, I introduce check system based on my observation of the system in local stores.  I was task to run a controlled pilot with the region of 240 associate for 60 days.  The results indicate immediate reduction of cancelations due to invalid checks. Based on the success rate, the process was implemented countrywide and the director was pleased with the results. 

Initially when I joined the project, my manager asked about whether the given testcase was automated. Since, there was no documentation, I had to go over the regression suite which consisted of almost 2000 testcases and find out if it was automated. This was a tedious task and the challenge here deep dive into the code and find out the testcase which took couple of hours.

So to overcome this challenge, I came up an idea to document the testcases at one place so whenever someone has to learn or get information about the regression can look at the document and easily find out the details.

For this, I started by consolidating testcases from code and their existence on test case management tool, and bifurcate these testcases based on the high level scenario and application. Once testcases were bifurcated, I created separate issue links and documented. I also created a separate table which included no of testcases for a particular scenario. This helped to standardize the QA process by maintaining high quality standards and save lot of time when someone asks about particular testcase, or when automation had to be updated, or for new comer it is a place to start consolidating details from.

Thus after setting up the processes, it helped in standardizing QA practices and I was also appreciated by the time as making the process simple helped to save time and efforts going forward.

After this, we documented other critical processes and flows as well which helped the team to learn and save critical time, and maintain high quality standards for QA process.

Thus from this incident I learnt how setting up the process and maintaining high quality standards helps in saving crucial time.

Because my current role have to monitor and track status of 8d for approx 100 cases/month, previously, we had to do manual tracking case by case and follow up with team. My idea was we should have some tool that can assist us to monitor cases and I asked my team to brainstorm and emphasized benefit that we will get if we have this tool. We did small workshop and came out with idea for creating semi-auto tracker. Then we list down task and planned it together. We had weekly meeting to follow up pending tasks and discussed about obstacles and tried to fix it. Until we can implement this tracker then we evaluated effectiveness of it. We found it can reduced tracking time down 80%