Context
The project wasn’t moving. Developers weren’t delivering. Management assumed the business analyst was overworked, so they brought in a second one – me.
But the issue wasn’t workload. It was friction.
Geneva was the business side. Madrid was managing. Budapest held the analysts. India was coding. The geography alone made it political. And the project had no real center of gravity.
The Drag
You can’t fix a broken dynamic by adding more people.
You have to fix the dynamic.
The team didn’t work well with a remote PM disconnected from daily interaction. I offered to take the lead and keep coordination local. That was accepted.
From there, we restarted the requirements. Not in technical terms. Not in user stories. Just plain business language. What did people actually need? What would make their jobs easier?
Once we had that, I took those words to Budapest. The functional specs were added. Then I spoke to the developers in India, who estimated the effort.
And that’s when the politics returned.
The Twist
The head of IT in Hungary didn’t agree with the estimates. Not because they were wrong. Because they weren’t the number he wanted.
He negotiated the estimate down, cutting a few development days. On paper, the project saved about USD 5,000.
But while he was negotiating, my team of three in Geneva sat idle. I sat idle. The cost of waiting? Around USD 14,000.
What counted was the number in the spreadsheet, not the cost in reality.
The Insight
Savings that look good on paper can still bleed money in practice.
That was when I knew I couldn’t stay. I wrapped up my work.
Two pages. Arial 10. Everything the next person would need to know. What had been done, what was in progress, what was still unclear, and what risks remained.
A senior manager read it, squeezed my hand, and said she wished every report was written like that.
It was the most sincere moment of the project.
And the only one where clarity didn’t need translation.