This week marks the 10th anniversary of what has become known as the Singapore Project. It's real name was Commercial Lending System (II) or CLSII. The II came from the fact that the 3 year old CLS project had just been cancelled without delivering anything. Jeff De Luca was the only manager retained from the first project and he started again and built a new team, mainly from internal staff supplemented with a number of external contractors and consultants. Soon afterward the project became known as PowerLender - a name given to it by Lim Bak Wee the Executive VP of IT (CIO) for United Overseas Bank.

At the beginning we didn't have any idea of the influence the project would have. What we knew was that the project was big (maybe $20M) and strategic for the bank and that we each had a personal professional stake in delivering it. Jeff had identified several risks from the earlier failed project and chose to mitigate them in several ways. One risk was the architecture and object modeling and to mitigate that risk he brought Peter Coad in to the project. Another risk was the user interface design (we didn't have fancy terms like user experience in those days) and he brought me in to mitigate that risk.

Jeff always set out to build a great team capable of delivering the project and to identify and mitigate risks. He brought a wealth of experience in managing projects and his own unique approach based on his law that "It's 80% psychology, only 20% technology." When we mixed that with Peter Coad's techniques and his Coad Method approach, what emerged was a very fun way of working that enabled us to work quickly, and maintain high levels of professionalism and quality, to communicate easily and clearly, and to report progress in a fashion that was useful at the team level and right up through the executive ranks to the Chairman of the bank. It took months of gradual refinement and growing team maturity to put in place the methodology that we now know as Feature Driven  Development. Neither Jeff nor anyone else on the team set out to create a methodology. We set out deliver a great piece of working software that would enable UOB to be more competitive. It wasn't enough for us that the system got delivered. It had to be great! It had to be well received, easy to adopt, intuitive, and most of all capable of delivering on the vision of enabling faster and better lending decisions at all levels in the bank.

By spring of 1999, we had achieved that. A first deliverable version of the system was rolled out. Many of the foreign contractors began to roll off the project. I was one of the first to leave - as the UI designer, I wasn't required any more. In the latter end of the project I was in charge of the user documentation and manuals. Jeff followed me out the door 1 month later. Stephen Palmer stayed a few months longer. Others, mostly developers stayed up to 1 year longer. Eventually, the project transitioned completely to UOB internal IT staff and remained under maintenance for years and years to come. Perhaps they are still upgrading the system today. [If anyone reading this knows, please comment.]

Along the way, we had pushed the state-of-the-art in Java and OO methods. We'd built one of the biggest enterprise Java systems at the time - about 1.5 million lines of code. We'd evolved the Coad Method in to what we now call Color Modeling. We'd created Feature Driven Development. We'd provided Cliff Berg with lots of material for his book on enterprise Java development. And both Stephen Palmer and I went on to some notoriety in the industry publishing material that we'd development and matured during our stay in Singapore.

For me, the project restored my faith in software engineering and leadership and management in technology. Both Jeff and Lim Bak Wee were great people to work for - great managers, great leaders! Had I not done that project I would almost certainly have quit the profession in my early thirties and gone off to run a completely different type of business.

So, ten years on... Thanks Jeff, Pete, Steve, Paul, John, James, Terry, Lim Bak Wee and all the team from UOB. It was great working with all of you and one of the best professional experiences of my career. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Feature+Driven+Development, FDD, Jeff+DeLuca, Stephen+Palmer, Peter+Coad