Zach Willard Email & Phone Number

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Atlanta, Ga, Us

Bringing automation to the world of audit and financial transaction verification

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Leading the Self Service Client website engineering team - working on Northwestern Mutual’s Online Medical History Questionnaire, Application Tracker, and more.

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Created experiences on the logged-in client experience for Northwestern Mutual, using the latest web technologies - Javascript, Node, React deployed in an AWS cloud environment using Docker and Kubernetes.-Developed a strategy used by the client website department to reduce high priority open source security vulnerabilities, reducing more than 1000 high vulnerabilities in our applications to 0 at the end of 2020.-Improved Change Beneficiary web experience to enable clients to enter their their beneficiaries once for many of their policies with one transaction, driving greater client satisfaction.-Built a content hub for Northwestern Mutual curated articles on personal finance, specific to a client's product profile and preferences, driving greater client engagement with NM's products-Organize and hosts a bi-weekly meeting to discuss and learn about shared code, cross-cutting website concerns, and provide a space for engineers to deliver tech talks and share new learnings-Introduced an automated open source dependency updating tool to my team, and other departments became interested. Documented how-tos, provide support to onboard them and start a slack user community. Now consulting with enterprise level teams to put an enterprise solution in place.

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Contributed greatly to building a new summary page experience - The first page a client sees after logging in showing an overview of their account details. This is a highly dynamic experience showing clients information customized and relative to their accounts.-Built with a ‘micro-frontend’ architecture - Allowing the rendering of react apps or ‘cards’, inside a larger react app on one screen - allowing teams to deploy changes independently from each other-Lead the charge on creating shared React components to be used throughout the new summary experience and worked with other engineers on many different different teams, spanning Milwaukee and New York-Delivered the Insurance summary card, that will aggregate and and display data that could span 130 different scenarios. -Built developer tools used by other engineers to help them develop their cards-Used Jest unit tests to validate these scenarios so we could refactor and make changes quickly and confidently when new requirements were given.Deployed an online Medical History Questionnaire that is used to deliver a better onboarding experience, for our clients and speed up underwriting of new life applications.-Worked with others to design and engineer a rules engine that reads JSON data and produces a client's questionnaire in React. -This project positioned Northwestern Mutual to thrive through COVID-19 in 2020 with the majority of it's medical health questionnaires now being performed online. -Questions are dynamic based on the client's profile and previous answers givenDeployed a new personal preferences page-Allowed a client to update their address, email and phone information related to their account. -Troubleshooting of production issues using tracing tools like Kibana and New Relic

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Lead a team of Information, Solution and Content Architects, to plan and design content and data systems that support Northwestern Mutual's new client website.Applied agile techniques within a Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) methodology to align our Architecture team designs with the needs of 6 other scrum teams to deliver new website functionality.Also split 50% of my time for several months to assist with getting a Cloud Strategy team going and coach them on agile.

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

As a Business Analyst, I worked on defining requirements for new features for NM Connect, written in Product Backlog Items. I was also involved in analyzing the feedback we receive from SMEs and our field pilot, as well as involved in showcasing the new features our team develops to our Business PartnersNM Connect is Northwestern Mutual's first experience using the Agile Methodology, so it is exciting for me to be involved in a groundbreaking project for NM. Additionally NMC is a highly visible, high value project.Professional Scrum Developer I Certified

Milwaukee, Wi, Us

Member of the Universal Life Applications Support Team and Corporate large projects-Introduced change management to our team following ITIL and enterprise service management standards.-Support our business clients who encounter issues while using the application.-Ensure processing occurs on high profile cases and the critical path runs successfully.-Reviewing and approving code and data changes made by our onsite and offshore partners-Technologies used here are Oracle DBMS, PL/SQL, MQ Messaging, Autosys, Unix Shell Scripting and VB.NET-Contributor to the Universal Life 2011 large project-Misc. consulting requests from external teams

Racine, Wi, Us

I participated in several intern projects including-Lead Windows XP SP2 upgrade for the enterprise-Created service level management reporting using Crystal Reports-Created e-commerce software using Perl Script

Mba, Information Technology

Bachelors Of Business Administration, Management Computer Systems / Business

High School Diploma