The product owner had been on the project for over a year without delivering any software.
That was the situation I walked into when hired as the business analyst for a digital banking project.
Some documentation and screen designs had been produced, not perfect, but certainly enough to build something.
The product owner was friendly and clever enough that the complete lack of progress made no sense.
I became very interested in discovering why so little had been done, and equally started to suspect something had gone very wrong.
It turned out the project was never adequately funded by the business, and the product owner had informally agreed with a software vendor to build his designs ‘very cheaply’.
The vendor had gone one step further by productising the designs and was selling the functionality to his competitors. Worse still, what had been built didn’t suit the product owner’s own business!
Swift, drastic action was taken to address the situation before successfully commencing the work of building their new banking platform.
A cautionary tale about not having the right expertise on your team and trying to stretch too far beyond your budget.
If you are unhappy with your development team, they may need more detailed guidance.
Better software requirements can help with this.
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Frank Ray Consulting. Software requirements for agile development teams, particularly remote, outsourced and offshore development teams working in financial services. |