A few months ago, we hosted our first Evolve Beyond Meetup in London. We had a number of guest speakers, who each delivered a compact and illuminating talk (not more than 10 minutes each) on a variety of topics, but all based around lean and agile product design and development. Read more
Imagine an investment bank running with the following scenario:
Manager:
“Hi team, we are putting in place a new process for you to help us be more predictable and control our budget and schedules over the next year. By the end of December, we want you to hand in a plan that tells us:
To help you, we will be monitoring the progress every few months to ensure you have made the trades you committed to, on time and on budget.
If you find that a trade is no longer worth executing, please submit a change request form and get sign-off from your manager to remove the trade. If you would like to add a make a new trade that is not on your trading plan, please fill out a separate change request form and send it to your manager. When you are trading on behalf of external clients, please ensure you also get your legal counsel to make the changes to the contract and sign-off on it before executing any new trades not covered in your annual trading plan.
Please send any comments or questions to your manager and we will endeavor to answer them in a timely fashion.
While the scenario above is clearly insane due to changing market conditions and decisions that need to be made in microseconds rather than a year in advance, do they do exactly this with their product teams?
In 2007 the UK Department for Communities and Local Government (the DCLG) entered into a contract with European Air and Defence Systems (EADS, now known as Cassidian) to deliver an IT system that would underpin the FiReControl project.
The FiReControl project aimed to improve the UK Fire and Rescue Service by replacing 46 local control rooms with a network of nine purpose-built regional control centres. The project was expected to be completed in October 2009, and the DCLG’s original estimate of the project costs was £120 million. By 2009, two years into the project, the expected duration of the project had doubled, and the anticipated total project costs had increased by more than 500% to £635 million. In 2010 the contract was terminated. The DCLG had wasted at least £469 million as a result of the failure of the project to deliver.