As Head of Professional Services I took over responsibility for a number of software integrations written by a bioinformatics consultant who had previously left the company. One of these integrations was supplied to a parnter organisation and had been reported to have an undetected design flaw which raised a ‘highest severity’ ticket. No-one in my team was familiar with the code, so I had to reach out and coordinate with DevOps and Engineering for assistance.

Through bargaining and persistance I secured some time of one of the lead bioinformaticians to take a look at the code, review the clients requirements and make the changes. This was the easiest part – I recognised the issue with the code myself, but as I wouldn’t understand the genomics interpretation part, I did not want to make edits myself. The second part of the issue was with clinical decisions that had already been made with the flawed code. There was little that I could do here, but it was down to me to make sure that the right resources were aware and assigned to figure out which decisions had been impacted to report back to the client.

The code fix was done within SLAs, finding the impacted clinical decisions took longer. My final action was to ensure that the application was correctly documented for future support and ensure that the client sign off on the new implementation of the code (to ensure that there is record of agreement that it now worked as expected – which was missing before).

I was also engaged with this partner through organising a resource to work on custom reporting, using a combination of python and flask. I acted as liaison and project manager with the customer ensuring that the code was developed to specification and that milestones for delivery, test and sign off were met.