Close a Process Gap After Escalation

Project Background

AcmeCloud provides workflow automation software to mid-market finance teams. A top-10 customer discovered that a recent billing configuration change bypassed the team’s release checklist, causing incorrect invoices for 1,200 end users and triggering an executive escalation. You are the program manager assigned to lead the response and close the underlying process gap within 30 days.

Key Stakeholders

Customer Success wants a fast recovery plan to retain the account before renewal in 6 weeks. Engineering wants to minimize disruption to an already committed quarter-end roadmap. Finance and Legal want a documented root-cause analysis, customer remediation plan, and stronger controls before any similar changes ship again.

Constraints

• Team: 1 PM, 1 EM, 5 engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 support ops lead
• Timeline: 30 days for corrective actions; customer-facing update due in 72 hours
• Budget: $40,000 for tooling, audits, or temporary support coverage
• Existing commitments: two roadmap launches already promised this quarter
• Dependency: billing platform vendor can only support one integration change window every 2 weeks

Complications

1. The customer is threatening to pause expansion unless AcmeCloud presents a credible prevention plan.
2. Initial investigation suggests the issue was not a one-off bug but a gap in change management across multiple teams.
3. The VP of Product does not want to delay the quarter-end launches unless there is clear evidence they are at risk.

Your Task

1. Build a 30-day execution plan to contain the issue, identify the process gap, and implement corrective actions.
2. Propose how you would balance customer remediation work against the two committed roadmap launches.
3. Define the stakeholder communication plan for the next 72 hours and the following 4 weeks.
4. Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
5. Specify the success criteria you would use to determine that the process gap is actually closed.