John Coward
Credit Insurance system - recovering the project and managing evolutionary improvements to extend coverage to overseas marketplaces
September 2000 to August 2001
The project was to develop and host a customized website and back office insurance application package to the software house customer, who had recently entered the Credit Indemnity Insurance market as underwriting agents. When I joined, a web based quotation and new business function had been developed and linked to an existing administration system and this release was going live. The project had a complex customer charging mechanism, but the approximate work value was £0.5M.
My role: I was contracted by the software house client to head up one of their existing teams, and replace the existing project manager who had just resigned. The rest of the team consisted of a business analyst, a systems designer and two analyst programmers, together with the customer project manager.
There had been constant staff changes on the project – by this time, the project was on its third business analyst, second project manager – and also the second customer project manager. As a result, there was poor communication between the main user and the business analyst. Also, the analyst produced long unstructured specifications which the rest of the team could not understand. There was no detailed business requirement document and no business data model, just the original contract with high level functionality specified. The key assumption behind the project contract was that the existing established software house package was a low risk choice which would support credit indemnity business administration, and only needed a custom web front end.
There were many other more technical problems. The release just delivered relied on direct access to the Dun and Bradstreet website for credit checking, and the performance was slow. Individual web screens, which worked well in development, were unacceptably slow on site – and nobody had spotted this before the release went live. There was no means of viewing or amending policies over the web service once they had been created – and the admin package back office screens were difficult to use. Later on, I found that the acceptance testing database and production database, which were on the same server, were getting mixed up. Security was poor, allowing hackers in without much trouble.
My actions: The first thing I had to do was replace the business analyst. Fortunately, the new customer project manager was very able to fill the breach and clarify the requirements properly, and in conjunction with the technically capable systems designer we managed to specify, design, test and deliver the next release with some of the additional functionality required, and also remove some of the performance issues, which bought us some time and much needed credibility.
This allowed me to develop a strategy for developing the rest of the customer requirement, which included diversifying first to Europe and then to Australia and the United States. Once we had established all that was needed to be done, which included significant multi-currency changes to the website, it became obvious that the original insurance package had to be discarded, but it had been a useful piece of scaffolding in the early development process.
The key methods I used to recover the project were
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