How do you spell relief?

The project manager at a medical device company came to us with a hairy problem:

They had recently split off from their parent company and needed their UKG implementation ‘split in half.’

And they handle PII, so it’s CRITICAL that the new entity’s data was not accessible by the parent, and vice versa.

The trouble is: they had roughly a thousand interrelated database tables with almost no documentation (agh!).

And they were spending a considerable amount on overhead, maintaining duplicate databases on both systems instead of being able to operate each one on its own.

So, how did we know which DB tables contained PII and which didn’t?

Did we close our eyes, make a few snap decisions, and hope the client wouldn’t notice?

Not a chance.

We knew the new entities needed independently-working systems with total referential integrity.

And the PM was anxious to get this done right - and quickly, because of how much overhead they were burning on duplicate payroll management work.

We tasked a star consultant to the project, who divided our team’s time fairly evenly between coding and QA.

(If the PM had sourced a junior consultant for this, I’m sure it would have been a 90/10 dev/testing ratio!)

Ruthlessly testing a large amount of SQL work that UKG itself wouldn’t touch allowed us to achieve the outcome that matters most to us:

The *relief* the PM experienced when we were done.