Sabre Migration Project (2011)
The Mission:
To migrate Virgin America airline website (Internet Booking Engine), kiosks and sub-applications to Sabre by Oct. 28, 2011 from iFlyRes.
The Challenge:
As of July 1, 2011 (4 months prior to Sabre cut-over), the entire Virgin America full-time software engineering team resigned with just one man standing (me).
Development was only 15% complete.
Needed to step in for immediate role as interim manager, architect, developer, support engineer, QA lead, project manager, recruiter, facilitator and analyst.
Needed to take immediate knowledge ramp up of ALL existing systems/applications from former team.
Maintain 24/7 operations of all supported applications including but not limited to web, kiosks, frequent flyer loyalty program, internal corporate applications, ETL jobs and automated processes.
The Story:
The challenge before me was no easy feat for any software engineering team to endure let alone a single person. The monumental task of migrating an airline to a new reservation system as complex as Sabre can takes years for a software team to complete. I architected a plan to complete it in 4 months from the ground up.
The first momentous task was staffing. I needed to quickly build up a software team to complete the gargantuan development work ahead. This meant fostering partnerships with several contracting firms to recruit candidates. I also supplemented the team from personal connections. Budget constraints also meant I was able to hire only mid-level experience developers with no prior Sabre experience. I took on the overall architect role of overseeing and guiding every aspect of the development process, mentoring every developer and managing the software team. To make things even more challenging, we had turn over resulting in more re-training and loss of critical time. On top of that, we needed resources from a ranging skill set to handle our diverse and mixed platform technologies i.e. Java, .Net, scripting, DB programming, etc.
The next major obstacle was overcoming architectural roadblocks of re-engineering our legacy system to fit a new paradigm. Not only did we have to migrate to a new Sabre reservations system, but I had to completely re-architect, re-engineer and overhaul many components of our website such as the Internet Booking Engine (IBE), frequent flyer loyalty program integration, instant ticketing, back end processes, automated confirmation emails, etc. I also had to put on my developer hat and developed key software features on the web and kiosk on top of the management and architect role that I was already tasked with.
The next huge challenge was keeping all the existing systems and applications running after all the former software team had left. This meant quickly learning each and every aspect of our website including kiosks, automated processes and ETL jobs. We had countless outages of our legacy reservation system which meant hours of research to determine method for recovery. Still we kept the applications running and the business operating.
After many sleepless nights, stress and perseverance, we met the Oct. 28 deadline, had a successful cut-over to Sabre and did not look back. The migration to Sabre under these circumstances presented to me was not only a major milestone for my career but a bold and remarkable achievement by anyone’s standard.