Release captain (senior software engineer) at Orla Books
About 80 minutes. Included in Plus.
Release 5.4 must get a new bank feed connector live before an aggregator switches off its old interface on 31 October, but Android crashes, a slow migration and a quarantined test stand in the way. Judge readiness, recommend a plan and roll it out without over-promising.
Skills: Judge release readiness against written criteria and evidence; Separate what a dashboard shows from what the policy counts; Recommend a release plan that protects a hard external deadline; Ask for only the exceptions the policy allows, with reasons; Plan a staged rollout and the communications that depend on it
Site reliability engineer at Pantry Lane
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
Customers could not pay for about an hour and a half on a busy Saturday. Rebuild the timeline and impact from the logs, write a blameless review that fixes conditions rather than people, book the review and brief customer care without promising what you cannot keep.
Skills: Reconstruct an incident timeline from logs and records; Measure customer impact and error budget use; Write a blameless review that names conditions, not people; Turn contributing factors into owned actions; Brief non-engineers honestly about an incident
Communications manager at Orchard Gold Drinks Ltd
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
A mother's video of glass in your best selling juice is spreading, a second customer has posted a photo, a supermarket wants an answer by one, and the managing director wants to say the product is completely safe. Read the situation, issue a careful holding statement, and communicate the recall when it comes.
Skills: Assess the severity of an incident from evidence; Write a holding statement that is accurate and kind; Advise a senior leader against words that will backfire; Communicate a recall clearly to consumers, retailers and media; Work within legal approval and decision rights
Procurement officer at Eastmoor District Council
About 85 minutes. Included in Plus.
Four bids for a three year grounds contract. Score them exactly as published, deal with a price that looks too low and a panel member's late declaration, recommend an award within the rules, and handle the people who want to know the result early.
Skills: Apply a published evaluation method exactly; Investigate an abnormally low bid against the specification; Handle a late conflict of interest and recalculate; Recommend an award within budget and approval rules; Handle councillors and bidders within procurement rules
Data analyst at Kibble and Co
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
The dashboard says repeat purchases have halved since June and marketing wants 50,000 pounds to win customers back. Check what the number measures, find out what changed in June and what is incomplete, and tell the board what the data really says before it spends the money.
Skills: Check what a measure means before trusting its trend; Separate a mix effect and incomplete periods from real change; Combine rates correctly from counts; Write a board note that leads with the answer; Disagree with a colleague's figures constructively