A major digital retailer was experiencing many and varied service issues across the digital platform plus supporting technology, including cloud services. With peak seasonal trade and cyber weekend looming the likelihood of serious systems outage during this important ‘golden quarter’ was extremely high. Approximately 50% of £1bn business revenue traded during the seasonal 18 week period and any downtime would significantly adversely impact customer experience, brand loyalty and revenue.

Appointed as Head of IT Service and Infrastructure my role and immediate priorities were:

– Initiate diagnostic activity and priorities a number of immediate interventions to stabilise / de-risk technology and operations

– Effectively manage suppliers to deliver on commitments.

– Build trust at board level and manage challenging demands to ensure stakeholders in full support of approach.

– Restructure and build effective Service leadership team.

– Define long term strategic operating model while evaluating and selecting right sourcing partner.

– Deliver Peak Trade with zero outage across UK and International websites.

Launched a Peak Trade cross functional working team including representatives from all Technology support teams, key suppliers and also business representatives. Their objectives was to ensure any known major risks were addressed and coordinate all IT change and business trading initiatives in order to minimise adverse risk.

Restructured Service Management Leadership team to better align with core Business Operations including, Trading, Digital Marketing, Contact Centres, Logistics, Financial Services and Merchandising.

Introduced several new IT operational best practices with revised, clear, KPI’s and SLA metrics in partnership with outsourced service provider.

Rapidly introduce Supplier Management framework to recover underperforming services whist driving better value with cost efficiencies.

Improved enagement with major digital change transformation programme minimising platform distruption through poor change planning and execution.

Provided CEO/Board level presentations and reports on progress plus challenges.

The following major results were achieved:

– A Record level of Peak Trading sales were achieved and exceeded in the following two years through continuous service improvement.

– Seasonal sales in the ‘golden quarter’ were up by 7.3% year on year.

– System availability and stability achieved all time high at 99.96%, an increase of 3% in 6 months.

– Platforms supported a record levels of customer traffic and demand with 77% of transaction through mobile.

– Board of Directors recognised the team effort and results by declaring the ‘Best Ever Peak Trading’ for three years running.