When four organisations merge, their data systems don’t. Leadership were relying on a series of disconnected, time-consuming reports to monitor business performance — each giving an isolated view of one department, none of them talking to each other.

The goal was to give senior stakeholders a single, honest view of the business they could read in minutes rather than hours.

The problem

Discovery surfaced three obstacles that made this harder than it looked:

• No shared project identity — the same customer project had different names and identifiers across the merged systems, with no mechanism to link them
• Inconsistent data frequency — some departments updated daily, others weekly, making direct comparison misleading
• No normalised benchmarks — a metric that looked fine in one context could indicate a serious problem in another

Stakeholder interviews clarified what people actually needed to know: not raw data, but trajectory. Was the business moving in the right direction this week, compared to the rolling average?

What each role needed

Approach

I treated this as a product, not a report. Stakeholder interviews drove the spec; the data model and the interface were designed in lockstep.

I completed a Qlik Data Analyst course before the build so I could own the ETL end-to-end rather than hand it off mid-flight.

What I designed

Outcomes

What changed for each role

The role was eliminated before the dashboard reached full deployment.