The strongest thing I have worked on. The New Zealand Ministry of Social Development set out to replace its employment products with a new Salesforce implementation, with the existing jobs board functionality in Merative Cúram to be replicated there. Cúram was designated heritage on the programme, and I was the heritage subject matter lead and Lead Technical BA across the heritage teams.
The problem it existed to solve was concrete. Clients could not apply for a listed job themselves without phoning the ministry, which frustrated them and swamped phone operators.
I was selected for the role by the Product Manager, for four reasons: my knowledge of the employment processes themselves, my existing work in the requirements triage team, my Salesforce background, and my earlier work on other employment projects. I had expressed interest, but that was not why I got it. That was not really the culture there.
What I did
- Defined business requirements and user stories alongside the Product Manager and business-side stakeholders, then handed them to other technical business analysts in the heritage space and peer-reviewed their elaboration.
- Ran the investigation into existing employment processes and defined the future state, keeping it architecturally coherent and confirming that related processes staying in Cúram would continue to work as expected.
- Defined the integration between heritage and Salesforce, then refined it into actual service contracts.
- Represented the heritage side at programme ceremonies across all three heritage teams.
- Built, validated and presented the heritage estimates for the programme.
Where it got to
When I left in October 2025 the programme had reached end-to-end integration testing across heritage and Salesforce, with the first release scoped and finalised and slated for early 2026. I did not see it go live.
The first release covered jobs, recorded as opportunities, entered by ministry staff on behalf of employers, recorded as providers. Provider self-service was intended for a later release and was already in analysis.
The hardest part was the number of moving parts: complex existing employment processes, translation onto a second platform, and the number of people involved. It needed constant and careful coordination more than it needed any single clever decision.
The programme reached ministerial briefings. I was not in them, being three or four levels below that, and I mention it only as context for the scale.