Case Example:  Implementation of Single Sign-On

Context

I was hired to be the project manager and scrum master for a team that was required to meet a hard deadline of the first week of December, the Identity Team.

 The company had clients that refused to upgrade if a single sign-on solution was not in place before their upgrade in December. The current company security plan was in progress to apply Auth0 to handle single sign-on (in addition to many other things), but completion was long after the upgrade period.

 So, the team found themselves in a position where they had to provide one-off, specific security feature or the company was at risk to lose nine customers.

 Prior to my joining the team, they had made no deliverable deadlines and leadership & other teams were eating away at the time they had left to complete the project.

Actions Taken and Their Results

 1)    Minimized randomization by helping individual Identity Team members to avoid the multitudes of “shoulder taps” by providing logical arguments to leadership that convinced them to stop re-assigning team members, stop assigning them multiple priority one items on top of their deadline, and provide staff to the team.

·         I was able to reduce interruptions from 75% of their time down to 10%.

2)    Worked with Product and R&D to define the requirements for single sign-on, which would be a one-off solution prior to the implementation of Auth0, and then created and managed user stories that the team used to develop the project.

·         I created the first comprehensive list of requirements in bite-sized user story format the team had ever had for security and authentication.

3)    Created milestones with the team to complete the minimum required features to meet the requirements for upgrades using a t-shirt sizing method and translating that into working days; then I planned milestones after the primary delivery date to refine those features when not under the deadline.

·         We were able to save time on all mandatory features, delaying non-mandatory items until after the main deadline was passed (and the customers had invested in the company for another year after their upgrade) and making customers happy that they got what they wanted but also providing confidence that they would get fuller, better features over time.

4)    Introduced agile and coached the scrum team to make it possible to estimate the work more accurately through velocity over time, making it easier to measure the completion of milestones so that they could be adjusted.

·         As a result, we were able to get ahead one week after slipping for months. 

5)    Assembled a dependency team to identify and plan for all connections with other teams.

·         I primarily worked with the Identity Team dependencies, rather than other teammates, so the team was minimally interrupted by the process and allowed them to successfully meet each handshake required by dependencies.

6)    Reported to all interested parties with metrics derived from Azure DevOps to minimize non-development work by team members but still provide updates and answers for external teams and leadership.

·         This made it possible to track performance on the Identity Team without further costing them time in reporting on their performance.

7)    We, Identity Team, successfully delivered single sign-on two days before the required date with zero quality issues, saving the company the loss of nine high-profile customers.