Saturday, March 27, 2010

Anything wrong with this picture?

As an example, consider one of our first Agile projects. Its goal was to provide field representatives with handheld clients to access a back-end application for submitting and tracking loan applications for high-end recreational purchases such as boats, airplanes, and exotic cars. Without such a tool, the field representatives could not tell customers whether their loan applications had been approved for several days. In that time, customers often came to their senses and canceled the purchase. To finalize more sales, we wanted to be able to approve loans and notify customers while they were still in the showroom and still excited about the purchase. Furthermore, the business unit manager had calculated an opportunity cost for delayed delivery of the solution: If we missed the spring sales rush, we could lose up to $2 million in revenue per year, as well as losing market share and conceding the market leadership position to a competitor. That is an example of an urgent project. (The traditional IT group put in a bid of 10 months at $850,000; we did it with 4 people in 6 weeks at a cost of $73,000.)

-- from the otherwise great Dave Nicolette post that deFUDs Boehm and Turner (cited earlier in the Life/Death/Agility thread here). 

Reminds me of something I worked on once for an insurance company I won't name....

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