A Story about Telling a Practice

In December 2005, I was working in the billing workstream of a large telecommunications billing system replacement program in the UK. I'd been working on this program for 18 months already at this point. It was a 10-year program to replace all legacy billing systems with a more modern COTS software and introduce some new business capability enabling flexible and changeable product management.

I lead the billing interfaces workstream and was responsible for the delivery of interfaces between billing systems and third parties such as banks, BACS, and the treasury.

Our workstream was having our Christmas dinner in a pub near the office. We'd chosen this pub because most of us had been to the same pub 12 months previously for last year's Christmas dinner. It was funny to see so many of us in the same place around the same time of year 12 months on.

When I was there, I reflected on the last 12 months and what...