Challenge
The company faced a significant challenge in modernizing its refinery tracking applications on a global scale. Historically, similar projects had encountered substantial difficulties, often requiring full restarts due to misalignment between user needs, stakeholder expectations, and governance requirements. These missteps resulted in wasted resources, delayed timelines, and inefficient workflows.
Beyond the risk of project failure, managing an initiative of this magnitude presented logistical and operational hurdles. With over 100 team members involved across multiple continents, coordinating efforts, aligning requirements, and ensuring consistent execution became extremely difficult. Each region had its own unique operational needs, regulatory requirements, and technical constraints, making it challenging to create a single, standardized solution that would work across all locations.
Additionally, the company’s culture was heavily rooted in traditional waterfall project management, where requirements were documented upfront and major milestones were delivered in long cycles. This approach often led to late-stage discoveries of misalignments, requiring extensive rework or, in extreme cases, full project abandonment. To succeed, the company needed a new methodology that allowed for early risk identification, continuous validation, and iterative adjustments—all while maintaining governance control over a project of this scale.
Solution
To address these challenges, our team collaborated closely with project leads and core stakeholders to develop a proprietary Agile-based framework tailored for this global initiative. The approach emphasized early and continuous validation, ensuring alignment between business needs and the final application.
A key component of this strategy was shifting requirements gathering from a traditional documentation-heavy approach to a user-centric method using user stories. By focusing on how refinery staff interacted with the system in real-world scenarios, the team was able to better capture operational needs and ensure the application met user expectations.
Given the company’s background in waterfall project management, a fully Agile approach was not feasible. Instead, the team adopted a hybrid model featuring 8-week sprint cycles, allowing for structured delivery while introducing the benefits of iterative feedback. Every two months, key team members from different regions traveled to corporate headquarters to demo recent progress, gather feedback, and plan the next sprint. This cycle ensured that major misalignments or risks were identified and addressed early, rather than surfacing months or years into development.
By balancing flexibility with structured project controls, this framework allowed the company to reduce project risk, enhance stakeholder involvement, and align development with actual refinery needs.
Results
The first sprint alone revealed significant gaps in user and stakeholder requirements, issues that might have otherwise gone unnoticed for up to 18 months under previous project models. This early discovery allowed the team to make necessary adjustments before committing resources to misaligned development efforts.
The 8-week sprint structure enabled the organization to detect major risks early, modify project plans accordingly, and ensure successful application delivery worldwide. By integrating iterative feedback and stakeholder validation into the process, the company significantly reduced the likelihood of costly late-stage project failures.
Ultimately, the project was delivered successfully across all global regions, providing a modernized refinery tracking system tailored to operational needs. The company not only completed the initiative on time and within scope but also established a repeatable Agile-inspired framework for managing future enterprise-wide technology implementations.
Key Outcomes
- Reduced risk of project failure by identifying gaps and misalignments early in the development cycle.
- Saved up to 18 months in potential delays by detecting stakeholder disconnects within the first sprint.
- Successfully delivered a global refinery tracking solution, customized to meet region-specific needs.
- Introduced an 8-week sprint model that balanced Agile flexibility with structured project governance.
- Enhanced stakeholder engagement by incorporating continuous feedback and iterative improvements.
