Case Study: Rapid Development of Custom, Mission Critical Software

The fortune 500 company had already invested millions in a 7 year project to integrate a large vendor's payroll system. 5 years in, they discovered it wouldn't do one mission critical piece, and not only that, but the mammoth, capable vendor had already tried to create this piece of functionality - and had given up after failing.
 
We had already established a track record of pulling rabbits out of hats for this department, so would we look at the idea of creating a piece of software to integrate on the data side and put this functionality into a separate piece of custom software ?
 
Tensions were high and the company was already in the throws of re-organization after the 2008 market melt down, so we prototyped at just a data and test level for a couple months with little more than myself and occassional management meetings to establish ever evolving requirements, and help from one of the company's programmers to furnish the external data feeds.
 
After three months of successful 2 week Agile iterations to prove that would work with real data and real results - we had an established and proven domain model. It was decided to bulk up the team, create a UI and bolt it on to the domain model we had created. Four months later the small team reached substantially feature complete status - with a fairly impressive UI and back end feature set, after dozens of serious requirements challenges.
 
Three more months in stabilization, securing the app and rolling it out the large corporate user base - and we accomplished for a relatively small budget what the large vendor had not been able to offer.
 
It was also much prettier and possibly more customized than anything the large vendor's piece was able to offer, but that is just icing on the cake. Even without that, it would have been a huge win for this customer.
 
[This page was written in August 2009 as future history. The last of the events depicted above have yet to occur.]