Born 4th April 1970, in Liverpool UK. Matthew holds a full, clean, UK driving licence with his own transport. An intelligent and highly motivated individual, Matthew has over 12 years Life and Pensions experience, and over nine year’s experience in all stages of the development project life cycle.

Brought onto project as a result of corporate testing unit pulling resource from project. Role was to ensure that a "fit for selling" version of ípsis 32 (point of sale software by Crisp, of Birmingham) could be released in September.

Application was written in VB, and ran on a bespoke NT4 (SP4) workstation build, built by RLA tech contractor.

Fit for selling version rollout commenced end of September.

Matthew was practically solely responsible for the rapid analysis of the application, identification and escalation of bugs, and retesting of new releases.

Matthew was also heavily responsible for testing the NT build, ensuring that it was only possible to use the ipsis application, and no other NT functions.

Matthew also heavily advised the Project Manager in the control of software updates, and the overall development strategy of the project., controlling which bugs where fixed by Crisp, and liasing between appropriate business areas (Actuarial / Compliance / Marketing) to determine which bugs should be included in each release.

Matthew was a member of Britannic’s Salesforce Automation project, which was the introduction of a laptop Point of Sale system (ípsis 32 from Crisp), together with a distributed client management system (HOME by Cap Gemini).

Software was developed in VB 6.0 and ran in Windows 98.

Member of Program Level Test Team, which pulled together all other streams of testing (system, laptop, HOME, integration, functional) and tested the overall business processes.

Matthew was responsible for the creation of a Process Trial, to trial the impact of electronic transmission of proposal data on Britannic’s New Business processing area.

Matthew was also jointly responsible for the creation of a Process Trial, to trial the impact of the laptop on the salesprocess.

Business Analyst contract on Policy Administration and Claims / Termination’s modules of project to migrate RSA’s Pension and Life policies from legacy system to Unisys’s platform solution Unisure.

This project successfully implemented 93,000 POP (DSS type) policies in late October 1998 and 70,000 Unit Linked Pension policies (regular and single premiums) in December 1998.

Also implemented in mid December were 22 new areas of Policy Administration functionality, and 6 areas of Claims / Termination’s functionality.

Responsible for the detailed examination of system testing results and for guiding the RSA Business Projects Testing Team (business acceptance testers) through their testing processes, by the provision of interactive Oracle SQL scripts.

Responsible for leading the Business Projects team through the test management and reporting process, by providing practical solutions to the challenges facing the team, such as creating and maintaining Access databases to reduce time and effort in providing management information.

Responsible for the maintenance of the policy data in the Unisure testing environments. As project was a migration project, problems were identified with the data, which were then escalated to the migration team for resolution. However, this data would not be re - migrated to testing environments. Responsible for ensuring test environment data was updated in line with migration changes.

A nine-month period of deputation as the Manager of Model Office is included during this time frame. This deputation became necessary due to the sudden and unexpected illness of the Model Office Manager.

Completely fulfilled the responsibilities of the Model Office Manager in running Model Office both the routine and the management of the testing projects undertaken by the company during this period. This also included a recruitment drive, which resulted in the appointment of one permanent member of staff and one temporary.

Directly Responsible for the detailed planning, and scripting of testing strategies for several major application development projects.

Also responsible for controlling, co-ordinating and monitoring the activities of a team of seven Business Specialists (test analysts) at all stages of several, various major testing projects.

Responsible for the controlling, co-ordinating and monitoring of the same team of tester executors over hundreds of smaller testing projects.

Test Analyst role directly responsible for the execution of the testing processes involved in the several major testing projects shown below, the validation and documentation of results, and the preparation and delivery of training to the end users of the applications.

Test Analyst role directly responsible for the execution of the testing processes involved in hundreds of testing projects revolving around the new business, policy maintenance and exit processing transactions of a database package (CLOAS) on which RLA administered Unit-Linked and With Profit Pension policies, and both regular and single premium Unit-Linked Life policies.

Various clerical and administration roles which includes two secondments to IS projects;

• Member of Unit Linked project, to investigate, design, develop, test and implement an application to interface to CLOAS, and accurately price all the company’s unit linked Life and Pensions policies.
• To aid in the testing of a new computer system (CLOAS) for the administration of Unit-Linked Life, Unit-Linked Pension and With Profits Pensions policies.

Fully conversant with the use of personal computers, in both DOS, and Windows (3.1 / 95 / 98 / NT 4.0) environments, as a stand-alone machine or over a corporate network.

Comfortable working in a UNIX environment, having used both Xserver and CRT telnet clients, in a Korn shell. One home PC at home RedHat Linux.

Also fully conversant with use of Internet / Intranet browsers, e-mail and news groups. Familiar with the concepts and use of HTML, and wholly responsible for the building of my own home page www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mattmc. This site contains much ‘testing guidelines’ content has far exceeded 10,000 page impressions.

This methodology also aroused a fair amount of media attention, and available through standard mail are copies of a specific press release (entitled ‘Royal Liver Assurance Rings the Changes with BT’s Conference Call’‘) and an insert to a BT brochure (entitled ‘Taking the Strain Out of Staff Training).

Having worked in the Financial Services sector for over 12 years, for three different companies

Excellent knowledge of Life Assurance and Pensions products, including;

• Standard Industrial and Ordinary Branch products such as whole of life, endowment and term assurance.
• More modern policy types, such as pension policies (including appropriate and additional contributions personal pensions), waiver of premium, With Profits and Unit-Linked, Critical Illness and Permanent Health Insurance policies, PEPs, TESSAs and ISAs.

A preliminary IQ test has identified revealed an IQ of 148 (top two percentile). Currently attempting to schedule validated IQ test to qualify for membership of Mensa.

An avid reader of a variety of fictional works, ranging from Stephen King, through Roddy Doyle, Irvine Walsh and Terry Pratchett.

Also greatly interested in all things technical, from development and construction of my own web site, to involvement in third party beta testing programs.

I have been involved in beta programs for Akilisoft and their educational software currently named Math Safari. Tested software extensively, providing constructive feedback to beta testing department on both functionality of the game, its playability and suggestions for improving the game, and better matching to target audience.

Beta tested an e-mail gateway to direct e-mail to mobile telephones. E-mail sent as SMS message. Testing involved the use of various e-mail formats (HTML, MIME), sending of multiple part messages, attachments.

Also tested the gateway configuration software, which allowed the user to specify what information was received, if copies where to be sent to normal e-mail account etc.

Educated to ‘O’ Level standard at Alsop School in Walton, Liverpool, with ‘O’ level passes in Mathematics, English (language and literature), Chemistry, Physics, French, Latin, and History.

Mr Rob Rogers, Compliance Officer (rob_rogers@royal-liver.com - 0151 600 4305)
Mr Paul McKay, Point of Sale Project Manager (Paul.McKay@royal-liver.com - 0151 600 4390)

At Britannic Assurance, Wythall Green, Wythall, Birmingham

Ian Lamb, Project Manager, Pensions Migrations (Ian.Lamb@RSA12.royalsun.com)
Frank Tippin, Project Manager, Life Migrations, BA Manager (Frank.Tippin@RSA10.royalsun.com)

Personal;

Mrs Janet Davis, 13, Grosvenor Road, Oxton, Wirral. 0151 652 0438.
Mr Leslie Glassar, 17 Naseby Street Walton, Liverpool, 0151 5215649

References are available by normal mail or e-mail, and are also published on my web site.