Retail Management Suite

The problem

A chain of shops has a lot going on at once: tills ringing up sales, stock levels, ordering from suppliers, customer records, loyalty points, and reports, and all of it has to agree across every branch, in real time. The job was to bring all of that together into one system.

What I did

• Owned the plan, working out what was needed, describing each feature, and guiding the work from the first idea through to rolling it out across the shops.
• Led the build of the main parts: tills and billing, stock, suppliers, customer records, loyalty points, reports, and the everyday running of the stores.
• Coordinated the outside services we plugged in, like payment providers and reporting tools, each one a separate company with its own timeline and its own ways of going wrong.

Why it was tricky

Projects with lots of outside connections succeed or fail on how well you manage those relationships. The payment and reporting providers all had their own release schedules, so fitting our plan around theirs took constant juggling and honest conversations with the client.

How it turned out

One system running across all the shops, with the outside connections added in an order that never held up the main rollout.