I’ve been at my company for a little over 2 years now. During my second year, I led an initiative to transition from a problematic and costly platform A to a custom built and budget friendly platform B. I won’t dive into all the reasons why we decided to transition platforms, but leadership and others were very excited for it and gave their approvals to execute the plan. We were in the final year of Platform A’s contract and we timed platform B to be ready a little before the end of A’s contract.
After a year of development, I got an opportunity to work on a different product on another team within the organization. I moved to this other team about a month before platform B was set to release. When I left, everything seemed to be going according to plan and it should have been an easy hand-off to my backfill.
However, delays and issues arose after I left, leading to upset users, business impacts, and a disgruntled leadership. (I’m still not quite sure what went wrong after I left that caused such a stir). After two months of delays and a lack of confidence from the team on when the issues will settle, the migration was abandoned and leadership ending up signing another contract with platform A. It was a desperate attempt to mitigate the impact the business was facing. Now leadership is unsure if they want to pursue moving off platform A in the future and requested a full investigation from day 1 to understand how this happened.
While I wasn’t directly involved in the recent challenges, I can’t help but feel concerned about how something this big might impact my reputation since I was the one who initially led the project. When we began this project, leadership was thrilled and praised us at the cost we were planning to save, but in the end essentially the opposite happened and we wasted a year of work. Could these circumstances negatively influence how others perceive my abilities and ideas in my current role? Or would others likely attribute the problems to the current team’s handling rather than tying them to me? Maybe it’s a little bit of both, but regardless it has me anxious about how this could impact my career growth in this company.
**TLDR: led a migration at work that was supposed to be done in 1 year and save lots of money. I switched teams 1 month before the project was complete with things looking on track. 2 months later the project failed with lots of money wasted. Does its failure reflect on me in anyway since I was originally the one who led the project?**