Write Your Short Term Goals

Thrilled and Intimidated! That was my feeling from inside when I took responsibility to lead a project that would impact major foreign exchange trading and would have millions of dollars at stake. So far Currenex provided trading opportunity in simple orders such as Limit and Stop Loss orders. As the trading evolves in FX field, there was a need for more flexible and complex trading system. We decided to offer conditional orders trading that can provide more flexible entry and exit points to the customers. Exciting it was, however, as soon as I stepped in, I realized the project was lagging behind schedule and the team members were under tremendous stress. To make the matter worse, the senior management had promised the release date to the customers and was relying heavily on this feature.
I immensely believed in the team’s potential because of its successful completion of many projects so far. However, I realized that though each of them was individually brilliant, there was no coherency, resulting in poor coordination. The minimal communication between the product management and development team resulted in lack of proper understanding of the complex business requirement among the development team. Similarly, the Quality Assurance (QA) engineers were not clear about how they were going to test the product to ensure an acceptable release. The stakes were very high since a small mistake can result in customer loosing millions of dollars in a bad trade or overfill which would earn a bad reputation for the company besides loss of revenue. At the same time I realized that too much work was to be done in a short time and we did not have budget to recruit new people.

I tried to get to the root cause by investigating and talking to members of each group. I discovered that each group was working on ad hoc basis, with little consistent integration effort. For example, product management wanted the part of the already placed order to be protected when the overall order... [continues]

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