A financial services client needed to reduce transaction and brokerage costs by making use of automated trading software from another part of the banking group. In effect this was a large systems integration exercise involving teams that hadn’t worked together in the past and had very differing styles. Management wanted a set of delivery milestones to cover 18 months with zero budget slippage.
Methodology
What Mark McKee advocated for was a set of agreed outcomes that would help achieve business goals. The purpose was to avoid a command & control situation where delivery personnel would have deadlines imposed upon them. By proposing an experiment whereby small steps would be delivered in sprints, the effect was to show progress quickly. This required building trust whilst adjusting to these (at times painful) cultural changes, but people were good enough to agree to these early stages as an experiment. The outputs from these experiments enabled more useful estimates that were based upon delivered features. This meant that the main outcomes had more of a path to delivery and could be extrapolated from the data. We agreed to achieve the main features by financial quarter (i.e. in Q3 rather than on 31 July). This improved confidence when the features landed in those quarters.
Outcomes
In the end, the agreed features that met business goals were delivered within an 18-month period and all was done within budget, bringing substantial savings.
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