PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY | EXAMPLES | WORK EXPERIENCE | CREATIVE

DISTRESSED PROJECT FIREFIGHTING EXAMPLE

RUBICON FINANCIAL PIPELINE MIGRATION | 2017

Program Brief

• Situation
• In 2017, Rubicon Project set out to build a new, scalable financial pipeline and migrate the business operations from the current, older pipeline over to the new one without losing a single dollar in the process
• Initially run as an effort outside of the Project Management org, the project found itself astray and out of alignment with executive expectations and oversight
• I was brought in to course-correct, bring project rigor, and regain executive trust
• Task
• Assess the current state of the project; delivery status, communication process, alignment with leadership
• Identify what was out of sync and why, make immediate corrections
• Determine realistic delivery timeline and get the project back on track
• Validate and prove with data that the delivered system has no monetary or data discrepancy when compared against the current system (within a threshold of five 9s: 99.999% parity)
• Actions
• Met with the previous leadership team to understand their process and status update
• Met with the full team to review the overall project plan and ability to deliver, timeline agnostic
• Reassessed with delivery teams their anticipated timing based on optimal conditions
• Built a new project plan, accounting for known gaps in the new pipeline's architecture and reasonably buffering to allow some flex for delivery teams
• Created a new reporting process and cadence mixing both written statuses and verbal presentations, allowing for clear and transparent review by executive leadership
• Presented a revised timeline to reset stakeholder expectations, adjusted by one month from the original project plan
• Result
• We delivered the new financial pipeline and began the migration process on time
• We proved the new pipeline was accurate within the stated threshold, the company could trust the numbers being reported and could move the company's official accounting over

Business Impact

• This project was the lifeblood of the company and had no room for error
• Every invoice generated, every dollar tracked by Finance was based on the numbers reported by this pipeline
• At the end of the six-month trial period we had successfully delivered a new, reliable, scalable financial pipeline for the company
• I hesitate to state even ballpark dollar amounts as this was representative of the company's entire financial reporting. Rather, this effort was responsible for 100% of the company's finanical health and had the attention of the entire corporate leadership team

Approach

• Create a blameless environment, tensions were high around this effort
• Understand the concerns of executives and stakeholders, learn what was driving the anxiety and tension
• Understand the story from the project team on how we got to the current state, see where the gaps in expectation were
• Rebuild from scratch, learning the lessons of the first iteration

Communication and Reporting

• Established regular published reports per PMO standard
• Set up intermittent in-person status presentations for leadership's review

Challenges

• The project plan as inherited was incomplete, there were archetectural and validation gaps still to account for
• Tensions were high and trust was low, specifically from executive leadership given the sensitivity and implication to the company of this effort

Key Learnings

• Recognition that not everyone has the project management acumen that professional PjMs have
• Understanding that project failures and shortcomings don't come from malice or negligence; everyone wants to succeed and do a good job

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