The real benefit from Agile Delivery comes from faster “time to market”, as teams develop the features most important to business. It is universally accepted that the requirements shouldn’t be completely defined upfront as they get stale and hence are bound to change.
While idea-ting for new IT initiatives as part of the CIO’s team in of one the largest manufacturer and service provider in USA; we agreed to start a project to implement ‘centralized customer database’. Business requirement was to “cross sell products and services to existing customers across Line Of Businesses of the company”. When Power division sells a generator to a new customer; then Services division should have visibility/access to these customers for services sales; and so as other units of the organization.
During initial years of my IT career in late nineties, there was no sophisticated Master Data Management (MDM) solution available in the market. Neither, my customer had commitment to park huge budget for this project. To have single truth of customer data, we decided to put together a simple solution where customer data can be created and managed in one system/place. We started small by setting up a team of 4 members comprising of one database developer, two web developers and one business analyst. We had kept the name of the project as Customer Master File. We had a bi-weekly call set up to show the project progress, seek advice from business and take corrective actions. Me being a database developer and integration specialist; I started designing basic entity relationship (ER) diagram to host customer data.
Phase 1 project scope was to upload customer data received from all Lines of Business into the centralized database and provide a web interface for query purpose. When we showed our phase 1 output to Business team, they were happy but expressed interest to have ability to take that customer record into their own CRM and other system of records to see real value.
This discussion set-up direction for Phase 2 scope. We built integration to downstream applications for smooth flow of data. In order to address data quality challenges; we had to integrate zip code and address validation tools to sanitize address data.
While we were working on various iterations to bring new features; there was a parallel effort going to make Oracle Financials as corporate standard. In order to make Oracle Accounts Payable and Receivable successful for all business units; we had to work closely with ERP implementation partner on customer data. We took a design decision to take out CREATE customer functionality from Oracle modules and get Customer data feed from centralized Customer Master File. This was a huge decision and change management effort; but entire project team was committed for success and one team culture was already established.
The project started with a single database instance with a simple user interface website, got converted into enterprise wide application showing 20% increase in sales number in first year itself.
I can summarize the KEY characteristics of the project we delivered incrementally to business as follows:
- Start Small
- Iterate to show incremental business values
- Build what is required by business (nothing less, nothing more)
- Get feedback from business users or customers
- Take corrective actions
And guiding principles are: One Team, Openness/Transparency, Trust, collaboration.
Culture of Agile delivery is NOT prevalent, where higher importance is given to legal aspect of the project delivery; “what happens if things does not go as per plan?”. In this case, team from customer side and vendor side shall be contractually committed to deliver a scope upfront which may not be addressing the current business need; and both parties will be fiercely defending their stated positions…. This is what both customer and vendor should avoid to be in.
Would like to hear your thoughts!
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