Project Rescue

Rebuilding the delivery system of a B2B SaaS, and finding €220k a month in leakage

€220k/month: visible revenue leakage identified
>90%: of user stories had no link to any business capability
100%: backlog traceability to business outcomes after the rebuild

A vertical ladder of rungs from ideas through opportunities, business capabilities, features, user stories and sprints to releases; the user-stories rung is outlined in pink with a trace line up to business capabilities. — Fig. 01 — The rebuilt delivery hierarchy: every user story traces up to a business capability and a business goal.

Case file

Industry: B2B SaaS, integration-heavy product
Region: Europe
Service: Project Rescue / Engineering Operating System
Team: Wayne ArendseDelivery & Transformation LeadYurii KotulaCEO & Engineering Leader
Systems: Jira, restructured end to end

Client context

A European B2B software product company with an integration-heavy product and a long-term commercial roadmap.

Intelvision had been an embedded engineering partner for more than three years before initiating this audit. The client had not requested it. The delivery data did.

Business problem

Development had quietly decoupled from business outcomes. Tickets were completed, releases went out, but what the work was worth had become unclear.

Ideas were not captured systematically. More items were started than finished, work-in-progress accumulated, and visibility into system availability and integration failures was limited. Rework kept returning.

The stakes

Approximately €220,000 per month in visible financial leakage in potential lost revenue.
Approximately €315,000 in potential monthly revenue exposure.
Up to $400,000 per year in cost of poor quality, roughly 10% of annual revenue exposure.

What was broken

More than 90% of user stories were disconnected from any business capability
No systematic capture of ideas and opportunities
More work started than finished: uncontrolled work-in-progress
Limited visibility into system availability and integration failures
Recurring rework consuming engineering capacity

Diagnostic approach

The intervention ran on three levels simultaneously, because the leak was never in one place.

Strategy
What is the work for?
Articulated the product direction, mapped business capabilities, and established commercial priorities.
- Product direction articulated
- Business capabilities mapped
- Commercial priorities established
Operations
How does work become value?
Translated priorities into epics, features, and release plans tied to capabilities.
- Priorities translated into epics and features
- Release plans tied to capabilities
- Sprint-to-release cycle restructured around completion
Technology
Can the system show the truth?
Rebuilt the delivery system so every story traces to features, capabilities, and business goals.
- Full traceability enforced
- Delivery data made visible
- Quality and availability instrumented

What changed

The delivery system was rebuilt around traceability
Jira was restructured into a full product delivery system with a strict hierarchy: Ideas → Opportunities → Business Capabilities → Features → User Stories → Sprints → Releases. Every user story now has to trace upward to a capability and a business goal.
Investment decisions moved before the work
With every backlog item traceable to a capability, a roadmap priority, a customer need, and a commercial outcome, leadership could evaluate investment decisions before work started, not after it shipped.
Operating metrics were introduced
Three metrics now run the system: First-Time Yield, System Availability and Visibility, and Work in Progress.

Decisions

Traceability as a hard rule
No user story enters a sprint without a parent feature, capability, and business goal. Not a guideline, a gate.
Completion over starting
The sprint-to-release cycle was restructured around finishing work, with work-in-progress controlled explicitly.
Metrics that expose, not decorate
First-Time Yield, System Availability, and WIP were chosen because each one makes a specific failure mode visible.

Results

Measure	Before	After
Story-to-capability traceability	<10% connected	100% traceable
Revenue leakage	~€220k/month visible leakage	Identified, quantified, and addressed at the system level
Investment decisions	Evaluated after shipping, if at all	Evaluable before work starts
Operating metrics	Activity reporting	First-Time Yield, System Availability, WIP

Strike Team

Senior engineering leaders find the real constraint in a fixed-fee engineering diagnostic, then stay to fix it. Project rescue, fractional CTO, architecture and business cases.

About the Strike Team