A Case Study in Classic Mistakes
Mike was eating lunch in his office and looking out his window on a bright April morning. He was a technical lead for Giga Safe, a medical insurance company.
"Mike, you got the funding for the Giga-Quote program! Congratulations!" It was Bill, Mike's boss. "The executive committee loved the idea of automating our medical insurance quotes. It also loved the idea of uploading the day's quotes to the head office every night so that we always have the latest sales leads online. I've got a meeting now, but we can discuss the details later. Good job on that proposal!"
Mike had written the proposal for the Giga-Quote program months earlier, but his proposal had been for a standalone PC program without any ability to communicate with the head office. Oh well. This would give him a chance to lead a client-server project in a modern GUI environment, and that's what he wanted. They had almost a year to do the project, and that should give them plenty of time to add a new feature. Mike picked up the phone and dialed his wife's number. "Honey, let's go out to dinner tonight to celebrate ..."
The next morning, Bill met with Mike to discuss the project. "OK, Bill. What's up? This doesn't sound like quite the same proposal I worked on."
Bill felt uneasy. Mike hadn't participated in the revisions to the proposal, but there hadn't been time to involve him. Once the executive committee heard about the Giga-Quote program, they'd taken over. "The executive committee loves the idea of building software to automate medical insurance quotes. But they want to be able to transfer the field quotes into the mainframe computer automatically. And they want to have the system done before our new rates take effect on January 1. They moved the softwa ...