How TPM saves the day

The story

A project on the downhill...Deadlines are being missed...Stakeholders are losing their patience...

…a TPM is brought in late to save this initiative.

Can a TPM really turn things around?

3 months into your dream job…Eagerly establishing your brand...Your first 1:1 with the VP is about an escalation...Would you be bearer of the bad news…“...and here is why this project will fail”?

Can this project still be saved?

The problem

Crossbar - an oncall notification and escalation tool

Early development in Q3 2014

Promised delivery by EOY2014

Resourcing challenges

No TPM until Q2 2015

The analysis

Resources

Timeline

Scope

Technical challenges

Quality of product

escalation

clean The

We all have blind spots!

Technical & resource challenges

How many open bugs?

Stakeholders needs & expectations

Pilot teams’ feedback

List risks for the next delivery date

List open security issues

List personnel concerns

The resources

1. Form the new team - New resources. Old Code.

2. Code analysis for 2 weeks

3. Build. Buy. Refactor?

4. That’s it !!!! Start from scratch!

The new brand

IRIS

Why build it in-house AGAIN?

Need buy-in from stakeholders

Cost opportunity analysis

Why will it be different this time?

Re-define MVP

TPM & PM roles

Stricter timelines

Weekly Communication

Timely escalation

Pilot teams

Cost opportunity area

Iris Pager Duty

Integration Requires building Needs integration work

Opportunity Discounted Cost (3 Year) -$910K $1.26M

Scalability Evolve to needs Likely to scale

Alignment with needsShort term: Will meet most requested needs at Q3Long term: Alignment to all needs

Currently meets needs

Future Roadmap In our control (partially defined) Unknown (controlled by PagerDuty)

RiskShort term: Previous project was ~6 months into overrun.Longer term: Risk controlled internally

Short term: lower due to known alignmentLonger term: costly, and uncontrolled

10-week timeline of Iris

✓ Kickoff ✓ Requirements gathering ✓ Design review with SRSC, Security review, SRE exec ✓ Open user feedback sessions ✓ Ongoing roadshows ✓ Code complete ✓ Full pen test ✓ Onboarding pilot teams ✓ GA

The big difference

Crossbar Iris

Lack of transparency Weekly updates sent to entire org & bi-weekly review with execs

Built in a black box Stakeholders & users were part of the entire process

Too late to patch up all the security holes

Security team engaged from Day 1

Nothing delivered Delivered in 12 weeks

Blockers & delays Actual messages going out

3 key learnings

1. Be skeptical & inquisitive. Don’t believe when people say “everything is alright”.

2. We are the unbiased person in the room. Everybody has blind spots.

3. Remember why you like being a TPM in the first place :)

Q&A