potential incompatibility between project requirements and the bank’s culture and infrastructure.
Finally, the project needed to make sense from a technical, operational, and business perspective. The project manager collaborated with the development, architectural, and operations teams to create time and cost estimates and the steering committee approved the proposal. In general, internal banking project management allows a 20 percent margin for time and cost estimates. Projects that stay within this limit are deemed successful.
Elaboration
This phase aims to prove the system’s architecture by elaborating a well-accepted working skeleton called an architectural prototype. The point was to ensure that the team could actually develop a system that satisfied the requirements. The team’s business analyst gathered requirements. (Still, the users themselves prepared the current system’s “as-is” documentation, proving in some sense their commitment to the project.) Then, the development team prepared a mock-up demo with screenshots for each software function in a sequence following the business workflow and presented the ID user interface. The team then held user workshops—one with each user representative per unit and one global workshop with all units, gathering their comments, remarks, and suggestions on the user interface and business workflow and system functionality. The project manager sent debriefings of the workshops’ results to the users for confirmation, which in turn produced the necessary results for iteration 2. The team made the changes and top management signed off. The team also held a user-acceptance-testing workshop during which they received a second round of minor correction requests.
The requirements weren’t completely specified at this point. They were detailed only so as to ensure an understanding of the architectural risks of each requirement’s scope for subsequent planning. The team identified and prioritized the risks, addressing significant ones during elaboration. Addressing architectural risks can take several forms: research into similar systems, a stand-alone test suite, a working prototype, and so on.
In our case, a working prototype showcasing the architecture and user interface functionality was developed that enabled project management to mitigate architectural and usability risks. The ID hosted core banking, portfolio management, customer relationship management, fraud detection, suspicious activity reporting, document management, and a management information system for private banking. The team captured most of the system requirements. Common processes undertaken in this phase included creating process-flow, use-case, and sequence diagrams.
The team wrote use cases during the elaboration phase; each one would become the start of a new construction iteration. The user members of the team described in detail all the daily tasks performed until then, and the technical members of the team documented them. The document