A global leader in financial services had recently acquired a small start-up with a great idea – and all the working knowledge of its software product ‘locked’ inside the brains of a few founders. In order to scale up and enhance the product, the knowledge and functional design of the system needed to become accessible to a larger team.
The subject matter experts (SME’s) were geographically dispersed across the US and South America. And everyone involved was already “too busy” to embark on any sort of documentation project
Together with the founding team, we agreed to bring supplemental resources to the documentation effort – and to dedicate a necessary fraction of every SME’s time to the effort. We engaged an analyst based in Kolkata, India to join the already global team. Working together both virtually – and later bringing key team members together in the US for two weeks – the team completely reverse-documented the existing application, including business rules, data elements and all user interfaces. The work was completed, end-to-end, within 60 days.
The resulting functional design and operations reference allowed the new business to bring in a client support team and free up the founders for valuable business development and product enhancement tasks. The applications group was able to re-write and modify the software to allow it to scale with growing market demand. And the product knowledge that was documented remains a foundation for the new & thriving business.
