Danny Shirley's Product Portfolio

Replacement of archaic internal front office application with a modern application supporting business growth objectives.

Sunset regional front office application by re-envisioning business and system processes to be supported by a new modernized 'home grown' application.

Our regional front office application was built over 15 years ago in a now archaic programming language and was specific to North America.  Globally, we are targeting a single front office system for the company.  We decided that building domestic trading capabilities into an existing internal application would be the best path forward, knowing that the complexities faced in domestic trading are vastly different than those of international trading.  We have experts that know well international trading as well as the new front office and those regionally that know well domestic trading but not international nor the new system; we had to cross-learn across various functions to drive the program forward.

Spanning multiple years, I served as the Program and Product Manager.  My primary responsibilities included the following:  

- Defined program approach and core program team

- Built and managed the regional budget and resource utilization

- Hired business analysts, project managers and change managers to support program activities

- Led Steering Committees to keep stakeholders informed, aligned and to request support

- Led Senior Working Groups to present topics where core team members are misaligned in order to take a decision to move forward

- Led strategic business process workshops to document as-is process and system flows, identify pain points, collaborate on to-be target processes and document to-be process flows

- Led regional workshops to define feature level requirements with user stories supporting the need

- Led cross-functional workshops between Regional Business Process Owners and Global Process Owners to share the regional application needs in order for global experts to understand if the application functionality already exists, partially exists or is a full gap

- Led requirements gathering workshops to define system developments necessary to support business objectives

- Collaborated with 4 Product Owners to assign work across each development team and ensure a strong backlog to feed 4 development teams consistently

- Led User Acceptance Testing Leadership Team sessions to identify what should be tested next, who should be involved, when the testing will take place and how results will be documented

- Led User Acceptance Testing workshops to ensure application functionality covers business needs

Our first go-live is not planned until February 2026.  That said, we have delivered on multiple fronts since the program began in 2020; 

- Locked program resources, budget and scope

- Created and got approved the business case

- Grew development landscape by 3 teams

- Documented as-is business processes and defined the to-be state

- Increased regional knowledge of the new application

- Knowledge transferred regional business specificity's to global partners

- Aligned 'solar system' applications to targeted capabilities of the new application

Directly tied to the Front Office Modernization program, over 20 applications were impacted that required new integrations between the new application and the existing 'solar system' of applications.

Integrate the new front office application with 20+ business mandatory applications with minimal impact to each application and with zero disruption to the business.

- The legacy front office application was integrated via AgXML and other legacy technologies which all needed to be replaced with APIs

- The new front office application introduced new functionality which impacted some of the solar system applications, requiring development in these applications for them to work seamlessly with the new front office application

- Solar system applications are owned by multiple application owners, requiring strong collaboration to ensure proper integration and timing of the switch

I served as the Program Manager.  My primary responsibilities included the following:  

- Identified all of the impacted applications

- Led discussions with application owners to help them understand the changes to the front office and the potential impacts to their applications

- Aligned the roadmap of front office to each solar system application

- Built test cases for integration tests between each application

Our first go-live is not planned until February 2026.  That said, we have successfully integrated the front office application with a few of the primary applications;

- Front office to client portal

- Front office to and from scale system

- Front office from master data system

- Front office to and from back office

Our company didn't have a website that our clients could login to in order to retrieve important data and documents created throughout our end-to-end trading process.

Build a website that would allow our suppliers to access important data and documents that is fully integrated with our front office application.

- No existing application to build a roadmap from

- Integration with archaic legacy front office

- Building a scalable solution not only for the region but the globe

- Data migration cutoff issues due to the various statuses for each component of the end-to-end transaction string

- Defining new processes for a new application

I served as the Product Owner and Subject Matter Expert while in a role as a Project Manager within the Execution business function.  My primary responsibilities included the following:  

- Create business case in partnership with IT

- Provide functional requirements to external development partner for both the client website and front office application

- Create test cases for validation of development on both client and front office application 

- Test all development on both client and front office application

- Create Standard Operating Procedures for internal employees to reference

- Train employees how to use the new client portal and how to support external users

Successfully launched our company's first client portal in North America which has since been scaled globally across the company.

A new business trade flow needed to be envisioned and implemented into an existing application.

Design and implement an efficient module within our front office application to manage barge and barge freight logistics.

- While we were able to originally implement processes to fit the application, the processes were highly inefficient since the application was not developed to manage these flows

- An internal trading desk managed barge freight for the region which created the need for internal trades to buy and sell between grain desks and the freight desk

- Barges can be bought and sold multiple times as they float down the river, which created the need to duplicate transactions for the same barge

- Data had already been created in the legacy modules and had to be migrated to the new modules

I served as the Product Owner and Subject Matter Expert while in a role as a Project Manager within the Execution business function.  My primary responsibilities included the following:  

- Create business case in partnership with IT

- Provide functional requirements to external development partner for the front office application

- Create test cases for validation of development on the front office application 

- Test all development on both the front office application

- Create Standard Operating Procedures for internal employees to reference

- Train employees how to use the new application functionality

- Support end users through hypercare and beyond

Successfully launched barge logistics and barge freight modules, reducing processing time from 20 minutes down to 3 minutes while increasing visibility and ease of access to trade information.

While Human Resources had a generic on-boarding process for all new hires, regional IT lacked a tailored process providing new hires the best foundation to start from.

Create an IT specific on-boarding program for new hires that can be repeated and tailored for each role.

- No existing on-boarding program was in place

- No existing documentation was available to compile together to create the program

- COVID introduced additional complications for on-boarding

I served as the IT On-boarding Specialist.  My primary responsibilities included the following: 

- Envision an IT on-boarding program

- Create the curriculum for multiple regional roles in IT

- Persuade business stakeholders to allow new IT joiners 'live a day in the life' of their employees

- Create videos and documentation on various projects and applications

- Lead the on-boarding program directly with new hires

Successfully created an on-boarding program that is still used today that provides a new hire the best chance for success in their new role.

As with most business, applications become outdated and need to be replaced and sunset.  One project example required a full front office application replacement by consolidating business activities from the legacy application to the target application.  

Build legacy application functionality into the target application to enable the sun-setting of the legacy application.

- The target application did not have all of the capabilities that were mandatory to run the business lines that existed in the legacy application

- The database models were vastly different between the two applications

- The users new one application or the other, not both

- The legacy application had been used for over 20 years and required substantial data cleansing to enable a clean migration

I served as the Product Owner and Subject Matter Expert while in a role as a Business Analyst within the Execution business function.  My primary responsibilities included the following:  

- Understand the existing capabilities of the legacy application in order to document the requirements for the target application

- Provide functional requirements to external development partner for the new functionality required in the target front office application

- Create test cases for new functionality

- Test new functionality

- Provide feedback to developers on test results

- Create documentation for end users

- Cleanse data from the legacy application and create data in the target application

- Train end users on the new application

- Support end users through hypercare and beyond

Successfully sunset the legacy application and replaced it with the new front office application while maintaining business continuity.