A life insurance company decided to build a new customer database as it had multiple stand-alone administration systems, which meant that no-one could ‘see’ all of the policyholders. One of the visible consequences of this was that finance staff would wander around the building trying to find a person and a policy on a system (any system!) that matched the name and amount on the cheque they had in their hand.
The early stages of the project, the design and construction of the database, was highly successful.

However, in performing migration of customer data to the new system, it was felt appropriate to use the Royal Mail’s postcode software to verify addresses and to render them into preferred formats. When the project’s scheduled three months for data migration had elapsed, but with no end in sight, management insisted that validation activities ceased in order that the primary beneficial impact – knowing which customers were on which systems – could be achieved.