After a year of working in a duel role with widespread responsibilities, I realised I was more passionate about the systems and operations side of my role so after discussions with senior management I was deployed to a full time position focused on IT. Being part of the management team as IT Manager requires a broad knowledge of IT solutions for businesses and the ability to articulate a problem and potential solution. The role is primarily focused on :- Identifying areas of the business that could benefit from a technology based solution.- Designing the concepts around that solution and the desired outcome of implementing it.- Identifying the resources required to implement that solution (in-house or external).- If external, communicating the solution to the technical resources for development- Testing the solution- Training staff- Procurement of software and hardware- Interaction with external consultants- Implementation a help desk- Managing budgets- Prioritising development work- Delegating work to subordinatesI have developed my MS Excel and MS Access skills and used them to create business tools to assist with Underwriting, Claims, and accounts and receivable. I have developed skills in data visualisation which have assisted the management at board discussions and allowed the staff to see trends in their books which relate to large volumes of data that would otherwise be difficult to identify.The largest part of my role is the implementation of a new database system and optimisation of the business layer to best utilise the information in the database to create process efficiency.

AHI was in a transitional stage and some key senior staff had moved on, opening up positions in the Management team. After a lengthy period of underwriting in a market facing capacity I was looking for something different. AHI asked me to take on a duel role of managing the Underwriting Department as well as managing the implementation of new technology to meet our efficiency and modernisation goals. The Underwriting Manager role saw me managing a team of 30 staff which was new and challenging experience. Dealing with staff and client disputes added to my people skills and reviewing the entire portfolio as opposed to just my own section of it gave me a revised outlook on the state of the business. There were some glaring process management issues and these allowed me the opportunity to put my Systems hat on and dive into my passion for making things work the way they should.We set about implementing a few new projects. The key ones being:Creating a new smartphone appCreating a new public access Travel Insurance quoting and binding facilityBeginning the design process of a replacement for our aging database systemtransfering an existing book of business from another insurer into our systemsFinalising the new rating models I began in my last roleRefreshing the IT Infrastructure (servers, switches, communications)All of these were time intensive tasks, requiring process mapping and optimisation, designing and communicating requirements to the developers, testing solutions and solving sometimes complex and conflicting business requirements.My Excel skills blossomed and i became proficient in macros and other automation functions, reducing the need for administration staff.

I returned to Sydney to continue working with AHI after requesting a transfer in early 2010.Again my role remained very similar to my below role in an official sense but I took on more challenges in the Sydney office, my status growing considerably since the move to Melbourne. I was tasked with looking after an underperforming portfolio of brokers across New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and New Zealand, travelling around Australia frequently to visit brokers, attend conferences and maintain relations with key stakeholders. During this time I was the key new business provider for the portfolio, writing several large, technical risks for corporate clients. I was also in charge of the largest renewals of the portfolio and had a 95% retention rate over the time looking after the book. In around 2011, after years of pestering management about improving our aging and heavily manual systems, I was selected to design an administration solution utilizing our current database system and software capabilities. The design revolved around automating the invoicing of premium, the production of renewal notices and the production of policy schedules. These 3 tasks were a huge administrative burden on the underwriting department, pushing the available resources to capacity and beyond. At the time we managed around 9000 policies annually with around 24 staff in the underwriting department and were unable to cope with the workload. Using the systems which I was integral in designing, we now manage over 17000 policies annually with the addition of only 6 extra staff.I continued to develop my MS Excel skills, becoming very comfortable with complex nested calculations and lookup formulas and became the company’s primary data analysis information source. I advised on and created reports for management based on requirements and started a side project to rewrite our underwriting premium calculators, making them more robust and useful in the competitive market place.

I was selected to move to Melbourne to replace a respected colleague who had moved on to a role outside the organization. I took the opportunity to advance my career, immersing myself in the role. My role responsibilities didn’t change significantly from my previous role at AHI but the scope of my role did change. I had moved from a supporting underwriting role in Sydney to being the main source of new business underwriting, renewal underwriting and relationship maintenance for Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. I was dealing with a wide variety of brokers and broking houses, from large corporates to small suburban brokers in unfamiliar environments which were culturally quite different to Sydney. In this role I did a large amount of interstate travel for broker visitations, conferences and client entertainment.I also took on the role of the pseudo-office manager at the branch, directing workflow and assigning tasks to my subordinates. I completed a large amount of file and underwriting auditing and took disciplinary action where necessary for poor work quality. The operation of our Melbourne branch improved and the book of business in the branch grew significantly during my time in Melbourne.

I Joined AHI after being recommended to the company by a colleague who I worked with at AFA.I was tasked with looking after a part of the company’s portfolio of Accident and Health business, mainly focusing on Corporate Travel and Expatriate Medical Expenses business product types. My broker panel included Marsh Pty Ltd in 3 different states as well as some other large corporate broking houses. My role included:- building relationships with brokers- quoting new business polices- Maintaining the policy database- underwriting renewal business- produce renewal notices- invoice premium- produce policy schedules- produce endorsement schedules- manage aged debtors- accounts receivable cash allocation- maintain policy filesMy first 2 years were spent learning more about underwriting and marketing in the very different environment presented to me by AHI. I continued with my work in business process optimization, improving several very manual processes and replacing them with automated solutions. I became adept in the use of MS Excel, programming and maintaining large insured persons spreadsheets for several important expat programs.My underwriting skill improved over the course of the 2 years and I was offered a promotion to Senior Underwriter and a move interstate.

My role was to manage a book of Group Personal Accident business. This involved:- Maintaining the policy database- produce renewal notices- invoice premium- produce policy schedules- produce endorsement schedules- manage aged debtors- accounts receivable cash allocation- maintain policy files- report any breaches in underwriting agreement to our Lloyds syndicate in London- transition the group portfolio to paperless officeInitially the processes at AFA were very manual and poorly managed. During my time at the company I became very interested in and adept at programming complex Crystal Reports queries. Through this self-taught skill, I was able to replace 95% of standard underwriting templates and customer correspondence templates with automated Crystal reports apps, taking a heavily manual process and removing almost all of the requirement for manual calculation of figures and document typing at the same time.I was also heavily involved in the design of AFA’s front end database system, advising management and the developers on requirements for the system to ensure that processes were as automated as possible.I finished my time at AFA in an Assistant Underwriter role where I created several more queries to optimize the underwriting process, providing customized reports which brought all relevant data into the one document and highlighting situations where business underwriting rules and guidelines were being breached.