There was a situation during my current job last year, where the electronic communication

surveillance system was to be transitioned from CA Dataminder to SMARSH. As SMARSH

was an upgraded version and policies and rules worked differently, the count of emails
flagged per day had increased twice as to what we received in Dataminder. Also the ratio of
false positive emails increased which degraded the quality of email surveillance and
refrained to focus on complex issues.

We organized a brainstorm session one morning. After hours of work, I initiated to take the
lead on testing the system and maintaining a deck on the issues we have which would then
be discussed and explained to the SMARSH technology team to make them understand our
requirements. This was challenging because it was my first time to take lead over such a
critical issue and also to help the team to increase the quality of work.

I overcame this challenge by comparing the data or emails we received in Dataminder with
SMARSH, analyzing the content received and the types of escalations we found. I also
delegated various issues to each team member and asked them to scrutinize possible
solutions for the team. We performed various tests on the UAT platform to understand how
the system works and recognize potential refinements to be made before the system goes
live. I maintained a critical issue deck which included information about the issues, examples
and possible solutions by the team; this was further bifurcated into system functionality
issues and policy refinement issues. These issues were further discussed with the SMARSH
technology team and other internal teams as well.

The technology team then started reviewing the functions and tested possible solutions
provided by them and our team. Maintaining the deck helped the team to prioritize and
focus on the critical issues first. The refinements were made on a weekly basis and we saw
the system improving and working more in our favour. The count of false positive emails
flagged gradually decreased and the quality of data improved. Team’s productivity increased
and we could take up more projects as we saved good amount of time. This process not only
helped our team but also other teams in the firm using the same system.