Covered full delivery coordination single-handed after the agency went through redundancies with no handover, restoring release cadence within two weeks with zero service disruption.
→ Releases restored within 2 weeks. Zero service disruption.
Problem
Over the Christmas period, the agency went through redundancies and delivery coordination wasn't handed over. No replacement resource was in place. The platform had live release dependencies and active work in flight, with no one coordinating delivery across the agency and internal teams.
Context
This happened while I was Global Digital Product Lead at Fortescue, in the middle of a wider rebuild of the delivery operating model. The agency's redundancies came without warning and without a handover, over the Christmas period, at a point where the platform still had live release dependencies and active work in flight that couldn't simply be paused.
Business objective
Keep the platform stable and restore release cadence without dedicated agency coordination in place, covering all coordination and delivery responsibilities until the business could act.
Customer/user objective
Internal teams and stakeholders who relied on the platform needed releases to keep happening on schedule, without needing to know that the agency side of delivery coordination had disappeared overnight.
Constraints
There was no replacement coordinator in place and no handover material to work from, so I was picking up live release dependencies and active work in flight with whatever context I already had. This ran over the Christmas period, and the cover ended up running for two months in total, even though release cadence itself was restored within the first two weeks.
Stakeholders
Internal Fortescue teams and the remaining agency resource, who needed continued coordination without the coordination role itself having gone quiet. Whoever would eventually be assigned to replace the role, since I was also building the handover material they'd need.
Research and discovery
The first task was working out exactly what was in flight and what depended on what, since there was no handover document to start from. I audited the active work directly rather than relying on secondhand summaries, which is what let me re-sequence priorities accurately in the first two weeks rather than guessing at what mattered most.
Options considered
One option was to wait for the business to assign a replacement before resuming full coordination, keeping activity to the bare minimum in the meantime. The other was to step in and run full Scrum Master duties myself until a replacement was found. Given the live release dependencies already in flight, waiting risked a gap the platform couldn't absorb, so I covered the role directly.
Prioritisation
Getting releases back on a stable cadence came first, since that was the most visible and immediate risk. Documentation and handover material came alongside that once the immediate risk was under control, not before it.
Delivery
Stepped in to cover full Scrum Master duties as well as maintaining my Product Lead responsibilities, across sprint ceremonies, backlog prioritisation, and release coordination. Maintained direct communication with all stakeholders throughout the period. Audited in-flight work and re-sequenced priorities to protect the most business-critical items. Documented processes and created handover materials to support the transition when a replacement was eventually assigned.
Decisions made
The most consequential decision was to cover the role personally rather than wait for the business to resource it, even though that meant taking on the work for two months rather than a short-term stopgap. I judged that the risk of a coordination gap on a live platform outweighed the cost to my own priorities.
Trade-offs
Covering full Scrum Master duties for two months meant my own priorities on the wider delivery rebuild were deprioritised for that period. I accepted that because the alternative, an uncovered gap in release coordination on a live platform, carried more risk than a delay to my other work.
Business outcome
Releases restored within two weeks with no service disruption. Process documentation created during the cover period improved overall delivery processes and reduced the risk of a similar situation recurring.
Customer outcome
Stakeholders and teams relying on the platform experienced no disruption to releases beyond a short gap while cover was arranged. Nobody needed to manage around a missed release or an unexplained pause in delivery.
Lessons learned
Operational continuity matters more to stakeholders in the moment than roadmap progress does. A handover gap like this is often not caused by anyone acting carelessly, it happens when redundancies land without enough notice for a proper handover to be planned.
What I'd improve today
I'd want handover material and a documented process in place before an event like this happens, rather than being created during the cover period itself. That's the gap the documentation from this period was meant to close for next time.
