Presentation from March 16, 2019.

1. Case Study:
How to deliver early value,
create processes, and move
in iterations under scaled fix
price.

2. ● 10+ years of managerial IT
experience
● Certified SAFe 4.0 Agilist, Certified
Scrum Master
● International speaker
● Author of 5 courses for PMs, HRs
and leaders
● Spent 2018 in Dubai digitally
transforming commodity trading
industry

3. “Deliver on time and eliminate [scope
creep] by
scoping projects around Impacts, not
Features”

5. Middle East Today is Still Influenced by it’s History

7. I OWE YOU
Middle East Mentality
“I will buy from you now.
I will pay you later.“

8. Lack of a Sufficient Community

11. “In 1914, Ernest Shackleton, the venerated British explorer, embarked on
an expedition to traverse Antarctica. His recruitment advertisement in
The Times (London) read: Men wanted: For hazardous journey. Small
wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger,
safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”

13. Classic approach:
- All features + fixed deadline
+ fixed budget
- Must be estimated
competitively
- Buffers are never sufficient
- Not ready for change
Our approach:
- Fix deadline + budget
- Total estimation = non binding
- Sprint-wise billing

16. Development team 1
Features as
per RFP and
use cases.
Fixed budget.
1
Development team 2
Customer
support-driven
fixes. Fixed price
per month
2
Customer support team
NO visible cost. NO
visible work
tracking. Lots of
tickets.
1

23. ● A very tight timeline and lot of scope to cover
● Pressures from Finance and Legal teams on both
sides to “fully define and document” requirements
and technical design before signing the Statement
of Work
● Unsupportive and distrustful internal development
teams at the client side

24. ● No ownership or urgency on the dependencies
(other internal teams, third party vendors etc.) due
to the multiple delays in core development
● A ton of existing documentation and stakeholders
very reluctant to cover these topics again with a
new team

26. We started by writing down all the work that was
expected to happen over next two weeks.
Then we asked the team members to select only those
items that really must happen.
We decided to go ahead, and our first iteration focused
on transparency and execution of already planned
items.

27. The biggest problem we were facing was lack of free capacity.
Therefore the assumption we wanted to test was whether all the calls
were necessary.
Over the next few iterations, we proved our assumptions were right. In
many cases, we were able to identify customers who do not need to be
called to make their decisions.

28. Development team 1
Features as
per RFP and
use cases.
Fixed budget.
1
Development team 2
Customer
support-driven
fixes. Fixed price
per month
2
Customer support team
NO visible cost. NO
visible work
tracking. Lots of
tickets.
1

29. Using Scrum in Customer Support gave the team
ownership of planned and performed work by reducing
managerial control and increasing transparency.
With this information, we decided to connect experts
from different domains, including accounting and
marketing. The new team was named the “Education
Team” and its goal was defined as the continuous
accounting education of our customers.

31. Development team 1
Features as
per RFP and
use cases.
Fixed budget.
1
Development team 2
Customer
support-driven
fixes. Fixed price
per month
2
Customer support team
NO visible cost. NO
visible work
tracking. Lots of
tickets.
1
Education team

33. Divide the project into frequent milestones based on
the user journeys
User journeys grouped with their relevant dependencies
could be deployed all the way every 4-6 weeks, for
testing and feedback of key users.

34. Objective: Successfully launch version [3] of our [main]
product
● Key Result 1: Get published product reviews in over 15
publications
● Key Result 2: Get over 10000 new signups
● Key Result 3: Achieve trial to paid ratio of over 50%

35. Results!
1) 3 special internal projects launched
2) New team established
3) OKRs met and iterated
4) Some buzzwords are not
buzzwords anymore
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