Driving High-Performing Teams Across AI-Era Service Delivery

Full Case Study

When Docusign announced a change in strategic outsourcing supplier for global customer support, there was no existing playbook for how to move a support operation of roughly 400–500 people, spanning AMERICAS, EMEA, and APAC in a follow-the-sun model, across five languages (English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese), from one supplier to another without disrupting customer experience. I was asked to lead the project management and change strategy for this transition — coordinating across Operations, Workforce Management, IT, Security, and the outgoing and incoming supplier leadership teams.

The core challenge was continuity across three time zones and five languages simultaneously: customer-facing SLAs could not slip in any region, agent knowledge had to transfer intact, and tooling access had to be provisioned and de-provisioned in lockstep with headcount changes on both sides. I designed a structured change management framework built around three pillars — readiness assessments (tooling, staffing, knowledge, and compliance sign-off gates before go-live), stakeholder communication plans (tailored messaging cadences for leadership, frontline teams, and the outgoing/incoming supplier), and risk mitigation planning (contingency staffing, rollback criteria, and escalation paths).

I ran the transition as a formal program with weekly steering checkpoints, a shared risk register, and clear ownership across every workstream — from account deactivation and re-provisioning through Okta and Azure AD, to knowledge-base handover, to live monitoring of quality and volume metrics during cutover.

Impact:

• Delivered a ~400–500 person, 3-region, 5-language transition with zero material disruption to customer SLAs during cutover.
• The readiness-gate model reduced transition-related incident risk by roughly 30–40% compared to prior ad hoc transitions.
• The reusable playbook cut planning lead time for subsequent supplier transitions by 40–50%, since teams no longer had to build the framework from scratch.
• Zero additional budget was required — the framework was built entirely on internal governance capacity and existing collaboration tooling (Confluence, Jira, Slack).
• The Service Improvement Plan built to close post-transition hiring/KPI gaps was later adopted as the organization's standard SIP template, reused for a subsequent transition (Cebu) two months on.

Beyond the immediate transition, the lasting value was organizational: the framework was formally adopted as the standard operating model for future large-scale supplier transitions, and I was later recognized with Docusign's company-wide Customer Success Annual Award for the measurable impact and cross-functional leadership demonstrated through this program. It also reshaped how the organization thought about supplier transitions generally — from one-off firefighting exercises into structured, governed programs with predictable outcomes.

This project is representative of how I approach change management broadly: start from the risk the business actually cares about (customer experience continuity), build the minimum structure needed to control that risk, and make sure the structure outlives the project so the next team doesn't start from zero.

Full Case Study

At Docusign, two operational pain points sat at the center of this initiative: access provisioning that relied on manually maintained distribution lists (slow, error-prone, and hard to audit) for a supplier workforce spanning multiple regions and languages, and a growing global operations playbook with no formal governance — meaning content aged, conflicted, or went stale without anyone owning the lifecycle.

Identity & Access Governance Automation

Partnering with Identity and Technology teams, I redesigned access provisioning around role- and cost-center-based logic rather than manually maintained lists. This meant defining criteria that automatically assigned users to the correct Google Groups, Okta app groups, and Azure AD security groups based on their business title and cost center — with GlobalProtect VPN and RBAC alignment layered on top. The result was provisioning and de-provisioning that happened automatically as headcount changed.

Impact:

• Reduced manual access-list maintenance effort by 60–70%, freeing operational time for higher-value work.
• Cut new-hire onboarding cost by $30K–$50K annually, measured by a 30–40% improvement in tooling readiness time (time-to-provision), directly improving time-to-productivity for new supplier staff.
• Strengthened audit-readiness by ensuring access always reflected current role and cost-center data — closing a recurring compliance gap flagged in prior audits.
• Delivered entirely on existing platform licensing (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace) — no incremental software spend.

Enterprise Tooling & Reporting Governance

In parallel, I designed a governance model for the organization's global operations playbook — a formal change-request lifecycle, editing standards, and structured archival process. On top of this, I built a Jira-based reporting and dashboarding framework specifically for ELT (executive leadership) visibility — surfacing scope, schedule, risk, and quality metrics in a single continuous view.

Impact:

• Reduced manual status-reporting effort across the team by 50–60% by replacing manual decks with live dashboards.
• Improved leadership decision speed by giving real-time visibility into risk and schedule slippage.
• Built entirely on already-licensed Atlassian tooling (Jira, Confluence) — zero incremental cost.

Together, these two workstreams reflect a consistent pattern in how I approach digital transformation: identify where manual process is creating risk or cost, and replace it with automation or governance that uses infrastructure the organization already owns.

Full Case Study

At Docusign, two structural inefficiencies were quietly driving up cost and turnover in a geo-distributed, multilingual support organization: an escalation model that routed too many issues to senior staff by default, and a hiring/career framework that gave engineers little visibility into growth paths.

Peer Support Model Redesign

I redesigned the support model for localized-language teams, moving away from a traditional tier-based escalation structure toward a senior-to-junior peer mentorship model. Instead of automatically escalating complex cases upward, experienced agents were paired directly with newer team members for coaching and collaborative problem-solving on live cases.

Impact:

• Cut support-operations costs by $25K–$40K annually, measured by a 20–30% reduction in formal escalation volume, as newer agents resolved more complex cases with real-time peer support.
• Cut new-agent ramp cost by $8K–$13K annually, measured by a 15–25% improvement in time-to-productivity, since coaching happened in the flow of work.
• The model was later adopted by other customer support teams beyond its original scope at no additional investment.

Hiring & Career Path Restructuring

I also restructured the team's hiring approach and defined a clearer, multi-level career path for support engineers — giving explicit criteria for progression rather than ambiguous, tenure-based advancement.

Impact:

• Improved role clarity, cutting turnover-replacement cost by $9K–$15K annually via a 10–15% reduction in voluntary attrition on the affected team.
• Strengthened the internal mobility pipeline, supporting succession planning without external hiring costs.

The common thread across both changes is a belief that operational cost optimization doesn't always mean cutting headcount or spend — often the bigger lever is redesigning how work and growth are structured so the same team delivers more value and stays longer.

Full Case Study

At Dell SonicWALL, as demand for technical support grew quickly across a multilingual, geographically distributed engineer population, training had been handled ad hoc — inconsistent by product, region, and trainer, and increasingly correlated with rising escalation rates and slower new-hire ramp times.

I built the underlying lab infrastructure first — physical and virtual environments configured to mirror production conditions, using hardware and licensing the organization already owned — and then designed the curriculum architecture on top of it. Recognizing that curriculum alone wasn't enough, I also built an Instructor Certification framework to ensure consistent quality across regions.

Impact:

• Reduced new-engineer ramp-to-productivity time by 25–35%, through structured, hands-on labs rather than ad hoc shadowing.
• 15–20% reduction in repeat escalations tied to knowledge gaps, as certified instructors delivered a consistent standard of training.
• Delivered at effectively zero incremental infrastructure cost, using existing hardware and licensing.
• Became the reference framework for technical enablement across the organization.

This program remains one of the clearest examples of my ability to build something from zero — infrastructure, curriculum, and a certification standard — and translate it into a durable, scalable capability rather than a one-time training event.

Full Case Study

When I joined Global Payments to lead the Tier 2 Integrations & Developer Support team, technical escalations were handled through a shared team mailbox and a small set of phone lines, with no dedicated ticketing or service-desk platform in place. On-call coverage relied on a single physical mobile handset that was handed from one engineer to the next at each shift change — at times relayed by taxi courier between locations — rather than through any automated system. My focus was building the operational foundation the team needed to scale: structured intake and tracking for support requests, and a resilient, automated on-call model that didn't depend on a single physical device changing hands.

Service Desk Consolidation

Rather than introduce an entirely new platform, I extended the engineering organization's existing Jira instance with a Jira Service Desk license, giving the support team a purpose-built intake and tracking layer on a tool engineers already used daily. Every incoming request — previously an email in a shared inbox — became a tracked ticket with an owner, a status, and a history, giving both the support team and Engineering a single, auditable source of truth for open technical issues.

Impact:

• Replaced an untracked shared mailbox with a structured, auditable ticket queue, giving the team visibility into ownership, status, and history for every request.
• Gave Engineering and Support a shared system of record for the first time, reducing duplicated effort and requests that a shared inbox made easy to lose track of.
• Built on the engineering team's existing Jira instance rather than introducing a separate support platform, keeping the workflow familiar for engineers already working in Jira every day.
• Contributed to a 15–20% improvement in complex-case resolution for the team, alongside the structured coaching and process refinement this consolidation supported.

On-Call Reliability & Call Routing

The team's on-call model depended on a single shared mobile handset, physically transferred between whoever was on call — a fragile setup with an obvious single point of failure. I secured a phone allowance so each on-call engineer used their own device, and implemented automatic call routing so incoming on-call calls reached the current on-call engineer directly, without depending on a handset being in the right hands at the right time.

Impact:

• Removed a single physical point of failure from the on-call process, along with the manual, in-person handset handoff it required.
• Gave engineers on-call coverage from their own device, on their own schedule, independent of a physical handoff between shifts.
• Established a call-routing model built to scale as the team grew, rather than one that became more fragile with every additional rotation member.

Both changes shared the same underlying approach: build on infrastructure and tools the organization and team already knew — the existing Jira instance, each engineer's own phone — rather than introducing something entirely new to learn. That's a pattern I look for in most operational environments I join: find the process that depends on a single fragile point, whether that's a shared inbox or a single physical device, and replace it with something structured and resilient.

Full Case Study

At Docusign, billing support sat inside a multi-million-dollar outsourced customer-support operation without a dedicated owner — no defined SME structure, no documented escalation path, and no consistent quality bar across the outsourced agents handling refunds, invoicing, and payment disputes for a global customer base. Escalations were trending up, cases were sitting open longer than they should, and First Day Resolution — the clearest single signal of whether a billing issue gets solved on first contact — was stuck at 50%.

I took ownership of the function with minimal transition and built it from the ground up: a defined Billing SME structure, a documented escalation path, and rebuilt training and quality standards for the outsourced billing agent team. In parallel, I partnered with Finance and Supportability to fully restructure the Billing & Refunds policy documentation — removing the ambiguity behind a large share of avoidable errors and repeat contacts. Once the program was governed and predictable, I led its handover to a dedicated Delivery Owner, including reverse-shadowing support, so the transition carried zero disruption to customers or the outsourced team.

Impact:

• Cut the escalation rate from 14% to 10% of billing cases — a ~29% relative reduction — by giving agents a documented SME path instead of default upward routing.
• Cut average case age from 4.5 to 3.5 days — a ~22% faster resolution cycle — through the restructured policy documentation and clearer case ownership.
• Raised First Day Resolution from 50% to 60%, turning billing support's weakest customer-experience metric into one of its strongest.
• Applied against billing's share of the outsourced operation's cost base, these gains translate to roughly $700K–$1.5M in annual efficiency impact — fewer escalations and reopened cases converting directly into recovered agent capacity.
• Handed off a fully governed, self-sustaining program — SME framework, documentation, and a reverse-shadowing transition plan included — that outlived the original ownership change and became the reference model for the next hand-off.

This program is a clean example of the pattern I look for in any organization I join: find the function nobody owns, build the minimum governance it needs to become predictable and repeatable, and make sure it survives the next person who takes it over.