Introduction

A small boutique consultancy landed a million dollar contract to build a first-ever mobile app for a nonprofit that focused on community programs. Unfortunately, misalignment and ambitious scope put the entire initiative at risk.

Background

A religious nonprofit wanted to enter the digital age and provide their thousands of community groups with an intuitive mobile application that would replace tons of paperwork and help keep things organized.

This was brought to a small boutique consultancy, who historically had not taken on projects of that size.

The project was already several months in when it became clear that both the client and consultancy had very different ideas about the scope of the project, as well as how realistic their timelines were.

Tensions increased every week as the client felt like they weren't getting the product they imagined, and the consultancy worked harder than ever to keep the relationship healthy, ship more features, and wrangle an ever growing scope.

Approach

One of the early orders of business was to assess the reality of the scope for the project. I assessed the team's throughput of delivery and identified patterns and variances in planning, work break down, and bugs. This allowed me to build out a model of the development effort that I was able to tune and map confirm its efficacy by applying to the work that had already been completed.

This model allowed me to simulate the team's execution against the scope. I ran over 1,000 simulations to develop a histogram of completion dates and identified that 85% of the time it would take 10 years to finish the scope that we had only a few months left to finish.

After raising this internally and with the client, I recommended we re-scope the project immediately.

The client and I spent several days applying a modified user-story mapping approach to scope the project and aggressively eliminate anything that wasn't essential. After a few quick rounds of estimation, I was able to apply my simulation again and confirm we would deliver within the remaining six months.

Results

The client remarked that without my intervention the project would have failed. In the six-months of working against the new scope, the consultancy successfully delivered the working mobile application.

It was deployed without outages or bugs, and the clarity of scope that both client and consultancy shared allowed for better coordination of marketing and support activities that led to a smooth release.

Conclusion

While this case study mostly focuses on the work I did to help the consultancy I worked for, the techniques and methods employed to understand scope, break it down, forecast completion dates apply to every significant software project.

The client was deeply appreciative of the honesty, clarity, and new progress that my methods provided, and felt the project was doomed without my intervention.