The Contoso Convergence, Episode 13: The Audit Trail
An Advanced Dungeons & Dynamics 365 session. Episode 13 of 14.
Previously on: Episode 12, The Customization Nobody Remembers, Vex found a two year old tax override still running on top of a platform fix that made it unnecessary eighteen months ago, which meant international tax had likely been calculated twice for a very long time.
Two weeks to go live, and the party finally has to decide what to do with a discovery that’s bigger than a bug fix. This episode is about the moment a technical finding becomes an ethical one.
The Session
Vex: The override was patching a tax bug. The bug was fixed in a platform update eighteen months ago. Nobody removed the patch.
Sable: So for eighteen months, international tax has been calculated twice. Once correctly by the platform, once again by the leftover override.
Thorne: Every international order in that window needs review.
Ai. Cassiopeia: I can generate the affected transaction list. It is not small.
Marge: Feld needs to know today. Not after go live.
The party requests an unscheduled meeting. Feld reads the summary standing up, without sitting down first, which everyone in the room understands as a bad sign before he says a word.
Feld: (reading the list) This goes to audit and legal before it goes anywhere else.
Thorne: That’s the right call. It’s not a great one. But it’s the right one.
Feld: (setting the list down carefully) Two go live attempts failed because people were afraid to bring me news like this. You just did it anyway.
Marge: That’s the job.
Feld: I know it is. I’m still noticing that it happened.
Vex: There’s a smaller silver lining, if it helps. The overcorrection was consistent and directional. It should make the reconciliation methodical rather than exploratory. We know exactly what we’re looking for.
Ai. Cassiopeia: I concur. This is not a needle in a haystack. It is a known pattern applied against a known window.
Feld: (a short, tired exhale that’s almost a laugh) After everything else this project has thrown at me, “at least it’s a known pattern” is genuinely reassuring. That says something about the last four months.
Sable: It says the bar moved. Not that this is small.
Feld: Understood. Bring in whoever you need. What does the timeline look like with audit and legal both in the loop?
Feld authorizes disclosure, pulls in audit, and, for the first time in the engagement, asks the party what go live actually needs from him personally.
The moment disclosure stops being optional
Every episode up to this one has been about finding a problem and deciding how to fix it. This one is different, because the discovery crosses a line where “fix it quietly and move on” was never actually on the table. A tax miscalculation across a known window of international orders isn’t a configuration issue the team gets to resolve on its own judgment. It has legal and regulatory weight that belongs to people outside the war room, and pretending otherwise, even with good intentions, would have been a much bigger risk than the original bug.
What’s worth noticing is how unremarkable the decision to disclose actually was, once it got made. Marge’s line, “Feld needs to know today, not after go live,” isn’t dramatic. It’s the obvious, boring, correct call, and it’s only notable at all because of everything the party has learned about this project over twelve episodes: two prior go live attempts where the vague language of “data quality issues” let real problems go unnamed. Feld himself sitting through disclosures he could have made and didn’t. The default on this project, before this episode, was to let uncomfortable news dissolve into something softer before it reached the person who needed to hear it clearly.
Feld’s response is the real payoff of everything episode seven and eight built. He doesn’t get defensive. He doesn’t ask if it can wait. He reads the finding standing up, makes the harder call immediately, and then does something a lot of sponsors never manage: he notices out loud that the team told him the truth without being forced to, and says so, rather than treating honesty as the baseline he was owed all along.
What happens next
Audit and legal are engaged, the timeline is adjusted to account for it, and the party heads into the final stretch with every major fire from the last twelve episodes either resolved or actively being managed in the open. Cutover weekend arrives, and every fix built over the course of this campaign gets tested at once, live, in front of the whole company.
Next episode: Episode 14, Go Live Weekend, the campaign finale (coming soon)
If your team has ever found something that needed to go to legal or audit before it went anywhere else, you know exactly how heavy that meeting feels. Gamifying the Enterprise: Game Mechanics for Continuous Proficiency is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY3VWLVX
And if you want a framework built around surfacing findings like this one clearly and early, instead of letting them soften into something vaguer, start here: adnd365.com/start
A Tinkerers Notebook 