Giant Leap

The Client

MÁV Informatika Plc. (MÁVI) had been a fully owned subsidiary of Hungarian Railways (MÁV), later merged into MÁV and operating as its IT division. MÁVI had been one of the first SAP implementation partners in Hungary in the late 90s, and the key vendor of MÁV for passenger and freight transport, train control, railway management and train management solutions.

The MÁV group consists of companies responsible for the vast majority of railway operations in Hungary.

The Project

MÁV decided to implement a new train ticket selling system with features such as purchasing tickets from kiosks, on train stations, online at home and onboard from inspectors. Ticket selling included everything from the inventory management of ticket paper rolls to posting to the G/L system, including printing on mobile onboard devices and printing QR codes. It also included interoperability with foreign railroad companies in ticket selling and transaction settling, and compliance to international standards. Moreover, it included new features such as locating seats using train and car maps.

In addition to ticket selling, the project’s scope included route planning and distance computation using MÁV’s maps, passenger train assembly and seat management, ticket inspection, penalty and fine management, all of these big enough for a separate project.

My first roles were to:

• Support a team of circa 20 requirements analysts by holding trainings on UML and Sparx Enterprise Architect, by coaching and by consulting.
• Develop a clear and simple yet adequate requirements analysis and logical design methodology.

Later my responsibilities were broadened to:

• Contribute to requirements specification and logical design in critical areas.
• Hold trainings on BPMN notation and process modeling.
• Lead the requirements analysis and logical design team.
• Provide consulting in choosing implementation platforms.

The Personal Side

This project has been a giant leap for MÁVI due to its extreme complexity and unusual size. It has been a giant leap for MÁV to implement changes in so many business and technology areas. And it has been a giant leap for me, because I had to guide and support two dozens of eager people.

At first it looked like other projects, I just develop a methodology guide, hold some training sessions and the job is over. But it became a 9 months long story with daily contribution. Though it was more than burdensome, it was extremely exciting that I had to switch my mind over one domain to the other in minutes: at 10:50 I had a discussion about route planning, at 11:05 I had a discussion on remote printing techniques, and some minutes later I had a call on the secrets of BPMN.

Call me a draught horse, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that I could help so many people and that I had been involved in such a giant project.