Red Stars Green Stars

1. RED-STARS
GREEN STARS
DM: BOGDAN ADAMIV-KOSTYSHYN
AM: RIP
SOME TIME AGO

2. CONTENT
• Project overview
• Challenges
• Our solutions
• Issues
• Questions

3. PROJECT OVERVIEW
• Project objectives
• Re platform desktop application to
modern technology stack
• Implement additional functionality
• Cooperation model :
• T&M
• Process
• Hybrid Agile => Iterative Waterfall
 Team composition
 BA
 UX Design
 3(5) BE . Net
 4(8) UI Angular 2(4)
 1(2) DB MS SQL
 2(3) QA
 1 DevOps
 0.5 PM

4. CHALLENGES
• Scope, quality, delivery
• Scope estimated 2 years before project start (Don’t ask me why)
• US was not ready for task level brake down
• No UX design
• Play find and seek with SCOPE
• Stream dependency : BA->UX->DB->BE->UI->QA
• High level of Complexity
• Solution designed as platform
• 200K+ rows datasets to be displayed on a single page
• Technology stack changed on Project Kick Off
• Distributed team
• Team locations: Lviv, Dnipro, Vinnitsa

5. OUR SOLUTION

6. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MANAGEMENT
• Weekly status meetings
• Bi weekly sprint demo
• Monthly board meeting

7. ISSUES: WHAT, WHY
• In time delivery
• Core functionality estimation made by previous team was ~accurate. All other was
underestimated x2 times. It placed time bomb on the project
• Scope
• Scope commitment in SOW within T&M contract leads to missing expectations from both sides.
Budget appeared to be fixed.
• Continuously increasing scope as a result of requirements clarification sessions
• Estimate in hours for all scope was introduced after majority of features covered by BA – in a
middle of project timeline
• Communication
• Escalation on project state happens to late
• Black box requirements message was not transparent enough
• Finance
• Client blocked invoices after third month.

8. ISSUES: WHAT AND HOW WAS FIXED
• Delivery
• Decision to not set project on hold and continue delivery was recommended by DS
• MVP scope defined
• “New functionality” scope separated
• Project team extended +2BE + 4UI +1QA (for 4 month) for EPAM cost
• Phase 1B approved and extra budgeted (+1 month)
• As a result MVP delivered with one month delay from original expected project end date
• 2x rates for QA overtimes
• Contracts (unblocked after MVP released and majority of bugs fixed)
• Client comes up with idea to split equally costs for remaining scope
• After negotiation 2 SOWs signed: one for development and one for support to cover remaining scope
• All invoices where processed by client. Overall payment delay – 7 months. Ne fees payed.
• Client receives ~35% discount in total: project still remains in Green zone for P&L
• Milestones set for remaining scope

9. BACK IN TIME
• Follow project initiation checklist, especially on PMP
• Raise amber flag on kick off meeting
• Push back AM on psychological pressure tricks
• Estimate all in hours form a day one
• Insist on alternative discovery phase

10. Q & A
• What if (client answers)
• If you told me on early stages that we are on 50% underestimation in total I would
never start/close this project 