Project : Eleven systems, thirty-one provinces, at twenty-four

Iran’s state discretionary body handles violations by government organisations. It is staffed by judges and lawyers, and it is shaped like a large court.

In 2012 they signed a hard contract with us: eleven software systems across thirty-one provinces.

What that meant in practice

Every province ran its own server. Data from one province could not leave it, and each had to work without reaching any other. That constraint set the whole architecture.

More than seven hundred flights for the delivery teams alone. Far more journeys by road.

Two years of gathering what people needed, building the forms and templates each system wanted, and training. The obstacles came in every kind at once: technical, network, resistance to change, legal, security. We removed them one at a time.

I held signing authority for our company in that period, and signed over a thousand letters on its behalf.

I was twenty-four.

What I took from it

A programme that size is not managed by a plan. It is managed by removing one obstacle, then looking for the next one.

The constraint that looked worst, data never leaving its province, turned out to be the one that made the rest of the design obvious.