How This Program Manager Reduced Production Issues by 75% Through Strategic Auditing

Absolutely, sure. So, uh, currently for Walgreens, I'm, I'm actually leading the performance engineering group, so. Uh, we, we were ensuring, I mean, our, our job is mainly to, uh, my job is mainly to lead, uh, my, uh, performance engineer to ensure that any product that goes into production, uh, does not go down. There is zero downtime, and there are no production issues and all, all those things. So, uh, we were ensuring all the safety, but still, uh, we were seeing about, uh, one production issue, uh, per quarter or something like that, serious production issues per, per quarter. So, I had to deep dive in, in, into this to actually build in efforts to uh ensure that uh we were, we were not losing it because of something that we could have done earlier. So, uh, my first thing was, uh, most of the times when we run tests and go, uh, sometimes there were not uh big communication between the teams who did the change and the performance engineers who actually evaluated the fix. So what I did was to actually put in an audit process. Which enabled that we were gathering for all, all the applications that we work on whether we were gathering all the things, all the required details from, from the team, from the business team, and also from the, uh, development team which, which actually put in that fix. So, uh, my audit process improved, uh, understanding of, of all, all, all the things and where we are missing, where, where the involvements in production and also where the involvements in performance has this gap. So, which, which closed down this to about, uh, uh, 1,1 defect in 4 months or so. So currently, I, I still see there's a big gap between, uh, still we, we are seeing about 11 defect, let's say 4 or 5 months in production. So what I'm actually working on is, is to enable a few more additional processes for, for the team, uh, so they can, uh, use those to narrow this gap further and then, uh, have a quality, uh, Work done throughout the year. So, so that, that's the, uh, I'll, I'll be happy to further go into what

Absolutely. So, so, the Cays was, uh, so in one of the, uh, times what happened is one of the engineers who worked on the product, uh, work, worked on the release, uh, had left the company and, uh, I had to dive in at the time to understand what was the issue and how, uh, how to resolve it and also finally came back to understand. And that's, that's what triggered me to, uh, see that big, uh, which, uh, this common occurrence across multiple times, uh, 4 or 5 times a year that this is happening. So that was a catalyst for me to actually put in all this process in place.

Oh yes, yeah. So an engineer who worked on a product had to leave the company, and, and this product released, uh, to production after he left the company. So at the time, since there were no people to actually take care of it, I, I dove in and then actually helped resolve the problem, and then later came back to find what was the issue that, uh, uh, actually caused this or leaked this to production. So during my analysis, I found that uh there was this mismatch in involvement and we did not gather enough details, which could have actually helped solve the problem, uh, or catch the problem even before this was released to correction. So, uh, that, that was a very easy thing, uh, that could have happened. So that made me realize that if, if I put a better process in place, we can resolve, uh, more problems that are leading to production. So that was the catalyst for me, since I had to be on the front line resolving an issue and found that which could, which could have been easily avoided.

if for me it looks OK and I see you. No, no,

Absolutely. So, uh, if you look, uh, well, Kathleen, it's, it's not just something that I have to work, uh, within my team. I also involved my clients and customers in this process and help them that this is a continuous improvement. So, uh, and, and also, uh, not, not just, uh, I, I was actually improving the existing process, but I'm, I'm creating a new process now, uh, short of making my team to, uh, uh, finish up a charter before every project in which everyone Uh, no, not just my team. Every team contributes to the charter to help understand their perspectives on the project. So this is, uh, fixing that communication or communication gap between all these different various teams. So, uh, that is a great increase in client credibility, uh, for us, uh, because every, every time, uh, if, if, uh, uh, we, we are supporting Walgreens from Cognizant, and there is, there are different other vendors supporting Walgreens as well. So when a customer is coming to me and asking, hey, your process feels good, and I know you, you guys have a very strong, uh, success rate in production. So, uh, can you help me, uh, implement the same process across this different function at this different Um, so, uh, once, once you actually finish off and do this, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the same thing to, uh, to this vendor because they're running our Azure systems, and I'm gonna ask them to implement this again, and thanks for doing this. So, uh, the main thing that helped us. Defect leakage to production and also the client credibility uh with us.

Absolutely, yeah, so.

Absolutely, yeah, sorry. Yeah, no,

Yup, sure. So, So, yeah, uh, there is this thing called a number of major, major incidents. So, our operations team track the major incidents every time it happens, and they have it stored in, in a repository. So, the number of major incidents for the pharmacy, uh, side that we, we were working on, it used to be about, uh, uh, twice every month, and most of the times it, it can happen because of network or some, uh, infrastructure issues. So I'll just cut out the infrastructure issues. So what, the number of major incidents that was happening in the last year was about Uh, 2 every 3 months for the projects, well, for the applications that we worked on. So now it has gone down to, uh, 1 every 4 months. So, that's a, that's a metric I'm tracking on to actually, uh, ensure not just that, also the number of applications that we're working on per month. So those are the 2 metrics I'm, I'm tracking to ensure that, uh, my processes are actually improving the quality and, and production. OK.