Eating the Elephant
June 12, 2008
Our current engagement with a funds management company in Sydney, Australia is a large and complex beast, involving more moving parts than a swiss chronometer, an incredibly demanding business and the Eagle PACE Operational Data Store. The entire program will run for approximately 4 years, involve over 100 consultants, vendors and staff, and burn over $100 Million. We are interfacing with 3 front office trading systems (Charles River, Imagine and Blackrock Alladin), several downstream systems (Smartstream TLM, CoAcs and StatPro) and exchanging market data with Bloomberg, Reuters, Factset and S&P - Phew!
It’s taken nearly a year to truly appreciate the size of our ‘Elephant’ and learn that there’s only one way to eat it…one small piece at a time. Short term, realistic goals are the key to success, which fits beautifully into our development methodology - SCRUM.
Every team that implements SCRUM finds their own way to interpret the rules, but the common factors of successful ‘Scrumming’ are always apparent. Short, well defined and well planned ‘Sprints’ of work that deliver a working subset of the final solution which keeps the team well focussed and gives a sense of accomplishment. Before each sprint the team commits to the deliverable we are aiming for and make realistic estimates. At the end of each Sprint we have a ‘Retro’, a team meeting during which we analyse what went well and what we can do better in the next Sprint.
And so the cycle continues, we eargerly devour the elephant one Sprint at a time, tusks and all. The news on the horizon is that our next phase is more of a wooly mammoth than an ‘African Grey’. We’re hungry!
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