NEED
Often inter-company politics have as much of an effect
on a corporation's product or service as the actual product itself. In
this instance, a large corporate company had a hardware and software
development subsidiary. The product itself was doing reasonably well;
however, a number of the engineers who had developed the system from its
inception left the company unexpectedly. The product was left in the
middle of a new development effort, with all of the original source code
for the system missing or in an encrypted format without passwords for
access.
In the meantime, a major buyer for this product had
surfaced during a trade show, and agreements were made by the marketing
division of the company. These agreements included the addition of a
large number of new features for the product and a significant change in
structure.
SOLUTION
A team of Mitsi engineers and managers was brought in to
do a complete audit of the current system, studying its details and
making careful records of all information available on the system. All
of the source code was eventually recovered. Off-site interviews were
arranged with the previous engineers as well.
The Mitsi engineering staff then went to work shipping
the product current generation product, revising the system, fixing
communications and software problems and incorporating the new features
which were needed. Over a period of several months, sufficient work was
done to make the product available for production once again. The work
was done in several phases, in order to keep up with past versions as
well as provide for future versions.
