Seven Weeks Before Christmas

How we managed to get a working app out in the field in eight weeks.

Our small team of misfits received a huge challenge, seven weeks before Christmas. We were going to create a mobile app that was actually going to be used in the field just eight weeks later, on the last day of the year. This is the super Agile story of how we made that incredible deadline.

At the time, I was coaching about six teams at the fifth largest worldwide accounting firm. Its global IT head office was located in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and I started when it was all still very small. Most of the IT stuff was done locally by the regional IT offices. The US IT office alone had three thousand people working for them.

But things were changing. The head office in Brussels had decided that more and more of the IT projects would be handled by the global IT office in Eindhoven. One of the reasons was cost-reduction: why let every regional IT office come up with their own solution to the same problem that every office is experiencing?

Another reason was the global standardization of accounting rules and regulations. Large accounting firms handle a lot of international clients that have offices in the US, Europe, and basically all over the world. International laws apply, and that makes a great case for…