One New Requirement. 50% Additional Cost.

1 New Requirement. 50% Additional Project Cost.
We were working on a custom development project to develop an appraisal system project for a small size hardware design organization. The organization was generating a large number of emails for its appraisal system.

The company’s employee performance appraisal system was based on an excel workbook and email system. At the beginning of the appraisal cycle, the HR coordinator would send out the appraisal excel workbook to all the employees. Employees would provide their ratings of the performance, and then they would share the workbook with their managers and HR coordinator. There may be a couple of rounds of discussion between the appraisal manager and the team member until they agreed to a common rating.

After this, the manager would send out the performance appraisal form to the head of the department along with the copy to HR.  The head of the department may change the rating and inform the manager and the employee, and HR coordinator.  Finally, all this process will culminate in the appraisal data given to the HR function. HR function, in turn, would normalize the ratings across the company and then decide on the benefits and the salary increase to be provided to the employees.

All this process generated a lot of emails in the system. Every employee was sending about 4 to 6 emails. These conversations would happily move into a range of 3000 to 4000 email per appraisal cycle. It was becoming quite unwieldy for the appraisal function to manage these 3000+ emails generated during one appraisal cycle.

The Head of HR function wanted an online appraisal system which would automate the email-based process and remove the need for managing such large emails. This was a simple process to automate because we had a standard form. The standard online form data can be used to communicate with employees, managers, department heads and HR.  There won’t be any emails floating around.

Manager of benefits was responsible for managing salaries for the organization. The benefits manager wanted us to implement statistical analysis capability. That would help the manager to determine increments to be provided based on employee performance based on Gaussian (Bell) distribution.

This one could increase our development cost by 150% as statistical analysis is not a simple feature to implement.

What should the BA do in such a situation? What would be your recommendation?

Will tell you what we did after a week.