Beautiful Teams

Prologue: Paul Is in a Pickle

Paul is feeling some heat and he isn't happy. New government regulations require Contoso Pharmaceuticals to supply specific quarterly reports describing how it acquires, stores, uses, and disposes of chemicals. Hundreds of Contoso scientists have vast arrays of chemicals in their labs and thousands of additional containers are stored in the chemical stockroom. The only way Paul can comply with these reporting regulations is to have a robust Chemical Tracking System (CTS) that can monitor the location and status of every chemical container in the company.

Paul has been aware of this need for some time, but now it has become critical. Two previous teams from a corporate IT department had taken a stab at the Chemical Tracking System. Each team sat down with Paul to discuss his requirements, but neither team ever produced a written requirements specification and eventually both efforts were abandoned without delivering anything. Now Paul is under increasing pressure to deliver these reports for regulatory compliance and he has nothing to show for the previous efforts. Knowing how critically this application is needed, the research labs' IT department charters a new team to beat the project into submission.