Chief Information Officer / India
The missing step changed what the system could promise
- Technology colleagues
- 32
- Three heads; enterprise headcount 286
- Annual technology expense
- ₹6.7 crore
- Separate approved programme of ₹2.4 crore
- Commercial kitchen workspaces
- 12 premises
- Four owned and eight leased; no food-production claim
Decisions & consequences
012019 — Withdrawing a calendar release that had removed the work between users
I approved a booking release after checks showed that reserved periods did not overlap and that the application handled consecutive uses correctly. Meera’s facilities account exposed what those checks had left out. The selected operating arrangement required a ninety-minute turnover interval between uses. The application had treated the end of one customer’s booking as if the resource immediately became ready for the next.
We examined twenty-four selected bookings against the complete sequence. Seventeen fitted, and seven conflicted with the specified interval. The commercial sponsor wanted to retain the calendar and solve individual difficulties as they arose. I understood the disruption a revised account could cause, but I did not accept that the missing interval should become an operating team’s informal problem after the software had made the promise.
I withdrew release acceptance for the affected sequence. A ₹54 lakh, ten-week programme connected the booking rules with the facilities-defined interval and reconstructed the plan with responsible customer and operating teams. Twenty-one bookings fitted the revised sequence, while three were rescheduled. The revised number did not mean the original seven conflicts had been harmless; it reflected a new arrangement made after the resource demand was represented properly.
The ninety-minute value belonged to this selected arrangement and its accountable owners. It was not a universal cleaning prescription or proof that every premises requirement could be satisfied in that time. Qualified technical and operating approvals remained necessary. My lesson concerned the boundary of the software test: a calendar can be correct about reserved customer periods while wrong about the service sequence it claims those periods can support. I now require the acceptance account to include the work between customers before a clean schedule becomes a commercial commitment.
2023 — Holding room descriptions that had travelled beyond their evidence
A publishing review covered sixty amenity and equipment-description rows across the kitchen premises. Forty-four could be confirmed against the relevant room account, while sixteen lacked adequate support. Some wording had been copied from similar spaces because the rooms appeared to share a common offering. The convenience of the shared description had displaced the question of what was actually available in the particular room being offered.
The commercial team wanted to retain the familiar descriptions while facilities completed its checks. Meera argued that customers could already be planning around statements that had not been established. I supported withholding unsupported rows from the affected offers and separating the room-specific confirmation route from the generic content-editing process. Technology could carry the evidence and decision; it could not decide suitability by treating two room names as interchangeable.
The review used ₹39 lakh and eight weeks for the defined examination and workflow changes. Facilities and the relevant technical owners confirmed fifty-six of the sixty rows by the end of that work. Four remained withheld. We did not present the increased supported count as proof that every property statement or every potential use had been examined. Each confirmed row described a particular amenity on its stated basis.
The change preserved a distinction that the earlier publishing process had obscured: a plausible description is not the same as a supported promise. I wanted the next editor to see the source and owner of a room statement before copying it elsewhere. The outcome did not certify food-business compliance or technical fitness for a customer’s chosen activity. It made the published account more disciplined about what had been established, where it applied and what still could not responsibly be offered as fact.
2025 — Keeping a cancelled booking from automatically releasing the premises
Our cancellation workflow treated the end of a booking as a signal that the associated space could return to the offerable pool. A review of forty-eight cancelled bookings showed why that transition needed a more complete account. Thirty-two spaces had the required release decisions, ten awaited physical inspection and six awaited contractual clearance. The cancellation event was real in each case, but it did not establish the same next step for every room.
The booking team wanted a simple rule so unused periods would not disappear from the commercial calendar. Facilities needed inspection questions resolved before confirming the relevant physical account, while contract owners needed to determine the six outstanding agreement matters. I chose to make those decisions explicit in the workflow rather than allow a technology default to answer them indirectly.
A ₹46 lakh, nine-week programme introduced distinct states and responsible transition owners. The thirty-two cleared spaces could follow the release route. The ten inspection cases and six contractual cases remained outside that state until the respective owners established what could happen next. The programme did not automatically decide refunds, erase an existing commitment or give the operator a right that the agreement did not support.
The result was a more truthful account of the next offer, rather than a claim that all forty-eight cancellations had been fully settled. We retained the outstanding groups in the operating view and kept their reasons visible. I would use the same discipline when reviewing other enterprise workflows: the event that ends one relationship does not necessarily satisfy every condition for starting another. Software should make that remaining responsibility easier to see and manage, even when the unresolved state is less convenient than a calendar full of immediately available slots.