The best way to launch a project is to deliver tangible business value in the first 30 days. I call this the 30-Day Blitz.

It’s critical to start with fast delivery of something business people can immediately put to use because it provides clear evidence the project is headed in the right direction and will live up to expectations (at least most of them). People are very busy these days and they’re wary of system development projects because they’ve seen so many of them fail. They need to see something positive happen quickly before they’ll really commit their time and support.

This became clear to me some years ago when I was the engagement leader on a project for a company that provided financial reporting services to firms trading in commodities such as agricultural products, fuel oil, and minerals. This company cleared trades and provided trading data to the accounting departments of the firms that did the trading.

Because it was possible for a firm’s traders to do thousands of trades very quickly, the firms felt the need to get better intra-day trading data so they could better track the risks their traders were taking. My client decided to invest in a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art system to provide this trading data in a streaming real-time environment.

But, as often happens with such projects, the work got bogged down with expensive and complicated technology that did not work as expected. I was asked to come in and reorganize and reenergize the project. I plunged in and began investigating the project team and the state of the system that had been created so far. I found a lot of demoralized programmers and very skeptical business users.

The project needed the active support and participation of all parties involved if it was going to stand a chance of succeeding, yet people were reluctant to give this commitment for obvious reasons. The project had been under way for a bit more than a year and had so far failed to meet expectations. Who wants to commit to a failing project?

While all the heavy lifting was going on trying to reorganize and turnaround this big battleship of a project, I was able to get permission and a little funding for a quick project that would take some of the pressure off by leveraging existing systems and require just a few weeks of programming to give users some of the most important capabilities they wanted. It would not do everything the big system would do but it would start providing useful capabilities people could work with until the big system was finished.

This new system was in production in three weeks. It was built by pulling data from existing systems and combining readily available IT components that trading firms already had; the components were office productivity tools like spreadsheets and personal databases. These components were connected together by small chunks of program code to move data and do calculations needed for a core set of trading reports.

The system used a 20 minute batch data transfer cycle to pull data off the mainframe trade clearing system and put it into a trade journal database running on a server connected to the Internet. The data was encrypted using the PGP public domain data encryption algorithm and a second batch cycle used FTP to push trading data to PCs in the accounting departments of the trading firms. Programs running on the PCs unencrypted the data and updated Access databases on the PCs. These databases contained some preprogrammed reports and people already knew how to do ad hoc queries for whatever else they wanted to see.

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