You are Marte Solheim, two days into the job as engineering manager of Atlas Core at Fjordkart, an Oslo mapping-software company that has never tracked anyone's time. Its largest contract ever carries a fixed date and a penalty clause, and the board wants visibility and control. Before sprint zero opens next week, you must decide what you will offer its delivery committee.
The situation
It is Wednesday, 4 March 2026. Fjordkart sells mapping and route-optimisation software on subscription, with NOK 210 million in annual recurring revenue. Each squad chooses its own tools and pace, and the company quotes two numbers with pride: engagement in the 88th percentile of Nordic tech firms, and voluntary attrition of 6%. It has just signed a real-time routing build for the cold-chain logistics operator Nordfrakt worth NOK 24 million, due on 1 December, with a late penalty of NOK 400,000 a week capped at NOK 4.8 million, and a customer right to walk away after six weeks of slippage.
Within days, a member of the delivery committee drafted three measures: activity dashboards built on commits and keystrokes, mandatory daily time-logging, and a bonus of NOK 60,000 per engineer, payable only if 1 December is hit. Nothing has been installed yet, but the eleven engineers reacted to the rumour: their intrinsic-motivation index fell from 82 to 71 in eight days. Company history says that below 60 a squad produces less than its own baseline.
Underneath sits an arithmetic problem. The build was estimated at about 7,200 engineering hours, and the two squads assigned supply about 6,400: some 800 short. Two people, Eirik Lund and Sunniva Bakke, hold the routing algorithm in their heads; both have updated their public profiles since the announcement. Replacing either would cost NOK 1.1 million and four to five months of lost pace. The committee's model gives on-time delivery a 52% chance.
You come from running a public-sector squad that shipped to immovable dates without a single time report, but your appointment came from the committee, not from the squad. The committee wants the controls in before sprint zero; the chief technology officer holds that any dashboard will cost more output than it returns. Neither has put a number on the claim.