Mergers and acquisitions platform

Context

Brought in off the back of FinTech work for banks, onto a platform built with one of the Big Four, inside a five-year IBM programme aiming at the largest-value Watson product in the company's history. Worked daily with EY Transaction Advisory Services' CTO, CDO and CEO. The toolset was the full Watson suite: Discovery News, Social Media Brain, Watson Analytics and Cognos Analytics. The job was turning that capability into something an analyst would choose over the several tools already in use.

Approach

Discovery broke the application into four parts, any of which could have shipped as a standalone product: Orchestration (sign-in, workspace, project setup), Outside In (company research: news, social, financials), Smart Data Room (document classification, OCR, keyword search) and Analytics (visualisation and correlation). Wireframes came first because the argument was about structure. A single site map held everything agreed for beta, pushing the rest explicitly into release one and two, which is what stopped scope creep on a programme this size.

Outcome

The beta shipped to its four month deadline with the MVP intact, the outcome that matters on a programme this size: the scope held.