The Five Small Products
The Situation
Your role
BSS & OSS Project Manager
You are accountable for delivering the committed release on the committed baseline — and for telling the programme board the moment that baseline stops being true.
Three products were sized Small six weeks ago. The three-week estimate is spent, and the products are not close.
The programme is halfway through delivering a new BSS/OSS platform. Scope, budget and the go-live date are agreed, and the release carries a defined set of products. Six weeks ago the business asked for three more in the same go-live. The BA assessed them from the requirement: Small — two weeks of configuration, one week of testing. The programme absorbed them.
In SIT, the products do not fit the existing product model. They need catalogue objects that do not exist, new product-to-service relationships and configuration rules, an integration the platform does not have, and a fulfilment flow the current BPMN cannot carry.
UAT has started on the rest of the release, and business users are already naming order journeys for the three products that the original analysis never described. Every one is a scenario nobody has built or planned to test.
“On the requirement we were given, Small was the right call. The requirement was not the change.”
Sizing
Small — 2 weeks build, 1 week test
Ready
SIT
Catalogue objects missing · new integration
Blocked
UAT
Scenarios the analysis never saw
At risk