Turning Challenges Into Sustainable Improvements: Lessons From a Project Turnaround

Aakash Garg is a program manager with a strong background in the securities and capital markets domain, with a demonstrated history of working with custodians, investments and advisory firms.

  Agile   Product Management   Requirements Management  

Years ago, I worked as a scrum master and business analyst with a global custodian bank. The project involved developing and maintaining a reporting platform for various investment funds of multinational clients worldwide.

It featured complex architecture, ambitious deadlines, and, at its heart, a cross-continental team comprised of some of the sharpest developers and stakeholders I had ever encountered. The core development team was based in China, and their technical expertise was evident from the outset. Code reviews were pristine, and sprint deliveries were fast, efficient, and elegantly executed. Business teams were spread across the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

On paper, we were unstoppable. In reality, we were struggling.

Challenges and Barriers
The number of requests for creating new reports from the business remained stable. However, the number of reports supported on the platform increased gradually as new reports were created.

This meant the maintenance work on reports was growing over time. At the start of the year, the development team spent 70% of its time creating new reports and 30% on report maintenance requests. By the end of the year, the team was spending 70% of its time on maintenance requests and was struggling to keep up with the demand for new reports.

At this point, we had two options:

1. request …

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