“Six months late, and the money was running out.”

The situation

The firm collects secret-shopper data that hedge funds use to make investment decisions, and it needed a content management system to run that work. The project was about 6 months over deadline and over budget. The team of five developers kept missing feature targets and ignoring the design specifications.

What I found

Nobody on the team really knew how to use Angular or .NET. Some of them couldn’t follow direction, and wouldn’t accept training on how to use the frameworks properly. At the rate money was going out, the project would have been abandoned.

What I did

• Worked with the owner and the CTO to assess each developer
• Within a month, identified the three engineers who couldn’t follow direction or accept training. The owner let them go.
• Trained the remaining developer on both frameworks
• Finished the project

The result

• Finished in 3 months, before money ran out and the project had to be abandoned
• $55K freed from the developers who couldn’t deliver, put toward the people who could
• Maintained by one trained developer on minimal hours