CREATING A HYPOTHETICAL CASE SCENARIO ON COMMUNICATION

SUMMARY:
A financial software product company Fintec is planning to revamp its product
suite from TBMS 4.2 to a new product offering Xelerate. The communication
gap between the senior product design team and the development team
resulted in a long delay in the release of the product, thereby falling short of
client and market expectations which resulted in Fintec gaining a bad
reputation in the financial services market.
As a reader, you should analyse the case and recognise the issue, its reason and
try to devise a solution for it.
INTRODUCTION:
Fintec Business Solutions, a Bangalore based software Business Company that
provides revenue management and business assurance solutions for financial
institutions. Founded in 2007, it has support/ sales offices in 10 cities worldwide
and has more than 200 installations worldwide. Its comprehensive product suite
offered solutions for corporate banking, retail banking, investment management
and card services.
The companys initial product TBMS(Transaction Billing Management System)
was a huge success and helped them in roping up top notch banking clients.
Now, the company was planning to update TBMS and release a new product
suite called Xelerate. Mr Vinod Rakesh, the Platform Head was the one who
supervised the development process and Mr. Girish Nair, Software Architect
was assigned a team of 20 to bring about the changes. Mr Anil Sridhar, Product
Head was the one who presided over the implementation team was the point of
contact with the client side.
THE PROBLEM:
Mr Anil Sridhar and his team on analysing the various market scenarios and on
discussions with existing clients realised the need for a revamping of the
product if the company was to maintain and improve its growth in the coming
years. These findings were then passed to Mr Vinod Rakesh to bring out the
necessary updates. It was planned to provide service of another database IBM
DB2 along with the Oracle so as to improve the compatibility with more systems
as well as giving an option for improving transaction processing speed. The
company also planned to revamp the entire UI part from the struts framework
to the new multifunctional spring framework. Mr Vinod Rakesh assigned the
project work to Mr Girish. The development team was given a time frame of
only 4 months for such an important project and were not provided with a
proper timeframe for the project. The project was a highly confidential one as
its main aim was to rope in a new client Vista Europe which could elevate the
company to a new level. The plan was to get the internal release done as
possible and in the next 3 months to customise the product to meet Vistas
requirements. This part of the plan was not informed to Mr Girish.
Another problem which affected Girish and his team was that although they
were highly proficient in Oracle, they didnt have much experience in IBM DB2

and required training for the same if they were to implement such an important
and complicated project. Since there was a lot of time constraints in doing the
project they couldnt do undergo any formal training and had to study and work
on the job. Because of this the project was not going up to speed. Girish, in fact
met Vinod to discuss about the current situation and asked for more time which
Vinod was not able to accept and even asked the team to somehow finish it in 4
months even if they have to work 24 hours a day. Girish and his team were able
to finish it in 4 months, but without proper testing and didnt consider all the
scenarios.

IMPACT:
The update the development team made was provided to the implementation
team for the customisation process where it was found that there were too
many bugs and was not working efficiently to provide to Vista. This caused the
company the Vista deal as well as lots of time and money. The project needed to
be started all over again since in the end there was a delay of 1 year which
brought about new changes in the industry which also needed to be
incorporated into the product.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
The proper timeframe and the complete plan should have been provided to the
development team wherein they would have finished at least one or two
modules properly other than releasing one with so many bugs. Another thing is
Vinod should have realised the difficulty of performing such an operation and
should have either provided them some formal training and extended their
deadline as well as motivate them to perform better rather than getting angry.
REFERENCE:
This case is completely a work of fiction and bears no relation to any living or
any company. This is a work for an academic purpose. The resemblance of this
case to any real situation is merely a coincidence.
Total Words (excluding Reference): 765 Words