Provincial utility: cloud contact-centre platform integration and release

Locate → Land → Live, retroactively, is the shape of the work.

A large provincial utility was replacing its contact-centre platform. The complication was not the platform — it was that the platform had to sit correctly between three major vendor systems at once, in a regulated environment where an outage is a public event. The founder worked as a Test and Delivery Lead through a top-five global consultancy at the time — not as A&O.

Locate meant establishing what "working" actually meant across the integration boundary. Contact-centre builds fail at the seams rather than in the components, so the interesting question was which failure modes mattered: what happens when one vendor system is slow, what happens on failover, what the customer experiences when a hand-off degrades.

Land meant running the full testing programme — functional, integration, failover, user acceptance, and regression — against an estate spanning SAP, Cisco, and Google CCAI. Negotiating across external vendors and regulated enterprise stakeholders was a larger part of the job than the testing itself. Each vendor had a defensible view of where its responsibility ended, and those views did not meet in the middle without work.

Live meant three separate releases into production, each one carrying the operational risk of a system customers depend on to reach a utility.

Three releases went into production. The integration held across all three vendor platforms.

This is the kind of engagement that shapes how we think about production readiness: the technical build was never the hard part.