Project Context

Northstar Analytics prepares a monthly performance report for a major retail client, BrightCart, covering sales, returns, and campaign ROI across 18 regions. You are the program manager coordinating a 7-person cross-functional team: 3 data analysts, 2 data engineers, 1 account manager, and 1 QA analyst. The report is due in 10 calendar days and is tied to BrightCart's quarterly business review, where the client will decide whether to renew a $1.2M annual contract.

Two days into report preparation, the team discovers that 11% of transaction records from the last reporting month are missing from one source system, and another 6% of campaign attribution records appear corrupted due to a failed upstream schema change. The client has already been promised an on-time report, and leadership does not want to miss the QBR date.

Key Stakeholders

The client VP of Operations wants a complete and decision-ready report on time. The account director wants to protect the renewal and avoid alarming the client unnecessarily. The data engineering manager wants time to fix root causes correctly rather than rushing a patch. Finance leadership also uses the report internally and expects numbers to reconcile within a 2% variance threshold.

Constraints

• Deadline: 10 calendar days, no extension approved yet
• Budget: $18,000 remaining for contractor support or emergency tooling
• Team capacity: no additional full-time headcount
• Dependency: upstream commerce platform team can provide support only 4 hours per day
• Accuracy threshold: any published KPI with over 2% unexplained variance must be flagged

Complications

1. The client has a board meeting 48 hours after the report due date and may use your report in board materials.
2. One senior data engineer is on planned leave for 3 of the next 10 days.
3. Sales leadership is pushing to avoid mentioning data quality issues unless absolutely necessary.

Deliverables

1. Create a 10-day execution plan to deliver the report or a scoped alternative.
2. Define your decision framework for repair, imputation, exclusion, or delay of affected metrics.
3. Propose a stakeholder communication plan, including what you would tell the client and when.
4. Identify top risks, mitigations, and escalation triggers.
5. Define success metrics for delivery quality, timeliness, and client trust.