OPERATIONAL RECOVERY
Restoring trust in business critical data
Owned and project-managed the recovery of a failing data service, bringing technology partners together while my team maintained live reporting.
Context and responsibility
Repeated service failures were undermining reporting during an 18-month company-wide programme aligning brands and services and introducing new products. The programme had substantial marketing support and MD attention. The affected pipeline supported approximately £280m in annual revenue and fed sales reporting, operational activity and commission calculations.
As platform owner, I held the data relationship with SAP. Missing transactions were reported through our Query Management Tool, and my team handled manual corrections. My responsibility was to restore the service; I did not own the wider transformation programme.
Finding a route to recovery
A request for a legacy fix revealed that the service had moved to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Ownership was unclear and there was no prescribed route to a fix. Repeated reloads and corrections had not resolved the underlying failures.
I reached out across IT, GCP, legacy data teams and developers, bringing senior managers and directors together for a kickoff discovery session. Working with a developer, I assessed a replacement feed and tested whether it retained existing transactions while recovering those previously omitted.
I developed the business case, work packages, indicative costs and delivery approach, then secured funding. I opted for funding without a separate project-management resource and managed delivery myself.
Delivery with technology partners
Once the new feed had been built, I validated it and planned the cutover with GCP, the Electronic File Broker data-transfer team, SAP, my development team and platform support. My team continued interim corrections during delivery.
The replacement processed new and amended transactions every two hours. Coordination with other projects brought upcoming sales types into the design. Documented procedures and the ability to retrigger the feed directly gave the team practical recovery controls.
Outcome
Restored visibility of approximately £60m in previously unreported order value. This was recovered reporting visibility, not newly generated revenue. The replacement covered existing and previously missing transactions, with two-hourly delivery and team-owned recovery procedures.