Introduction

Delivery is slow, expensive, buggy, and unpredictable. Yet, most efforts to improve things fail. I was asked to build a team to prove that you can have it all. You can have fast, cheap, good, and predictable.

Background

A Fortune 100 client had thousands of software developers, but very little working software. Estimates were short by years and budgets were wishful thinking. Shadow IT was rampant as organizations did what they could to work around the IT organization's inability to ship working software.

The idea was to build a development center that proved you could have high-quality software cheaper and faster.

Approach

Another consultant scouted locations around the world and settled on Medellin Colombia as the perfect place to establish the development center. I joined after the first few team members were hired and given the challenge: "Make them better than everyone else."

My approach focused on a mixture of 1:1 coaching, workshops, and daily management to grow the team to the best that I could. Most of the hires were fresh out of college or actively taking classes, so there was very little experience available for the team. Here are a few of the topics and techniques I introduced during my time:

• Scrum
• Test-Driven Development
• Acceptance/Feature Testing
• Software design patterns and principles
• Cycle time/Throughput
• WIP Limits
• Vertical Slicing
• Customer interviews
• Secure coding practices

Results

We presented a comparison of our team to a random sampling of the several hundred that existed in the client.

• My team delivered software 450% faster
• Bug free software across 2 projects
• Predictable delivery within 24 hours of projected completion dates
• No major rewrites or refactors
• First ever revenue generating software produced

I did not have visibility into the financials, but I was assured by my peer that we were much cheaper than other teams.

Senior leaders said, "You're a 5-point hitter. I wish I had more people like you." and "I can give you anything and trust you can pull it off." A team member said, "Working with you has been the best experience of my career."

Conclusion

At no point in the multiyear history of the hundreds of teams did anyone come close to what this team accomplished. As a part of my sampling of other teams and their performance, I looked back in time to see if any team had ever produced similar results. None had.

Unfortunately, the executive that sponsored this initiative left and the company moved on to new efforts and kept their slow and expensive delivery as-is.