Team 6 · Digital Banking & Technology

Digital Banking & Technology Pack

"The Feature Freeze"

🏦About Aurora Nexus Global

Aurora Nexus Global is a mid-sized financial services group operating across Malaysia and the APAC region. The Digital Banking & Technology division runs the ANG Mobile platform, internet banking, and the Group's technology infrastructure. Delivering the digital leadership pillar of Project Nexus 2027 means shipping better features, faster, but right now the team is trapped in a cycle of delays that have nothing to do with code quality.

⚠️Business Pain Point

Aurora Nexus Global's digital platform targets an 8-week release cycle. The actual average is 11.5 weeks. The 3.5-week gap is not caused by development complexity or testing failures; it is caused by documentation problems at the start of every cycle.

Business Analysts write requirements in formats that vary by individual. Product Owners and developers interpret the same requirements differently. Acceptance criteria are either missing or written so loosely that UAT fails on definitions, not functionality. When a feature fails UAT, the cycle stalls while the BA, Product Owner, and developer debate what was originally meant. The average requirements clarification ticket stays open for 8 days.

Senior developers have flagged that up to 35% of their sprint capacity is consumed by requirements clarification. Three developers raised this formally in the Q1 retrospective. One described it as "spending more time in meetings about what we're building than actually building it."

📊Release Delay & Requirements Quality Log: Jan–Apr 2025

Release	Feature	BA	Target Date	Actual Date	Delay (days)	Root Cause	Clarification Tickets	UAT 1st Pass?
R2025-01	Biometric Login	Aisha K.	31-Jan	18-Feb	18	Ambiguous acceptance criteria	4	No
R2025-01	FD Renewal Flow	James T.	31-Jan	14-Feb	14	Missing edge cases	3	No
R2025-02	Card Limit Self-Serve	Aisha K.	28-Feb	21-Mar	21	Incomplete security requirements	6	No
R2025-02	Notification Centre	Pradeep M.	28-Feb	07-Mar	7	Minor scope gap	1	Yes
R2025-03	PayBills Redesign	James T.	31-Mar	25-Apr	25	Requirements rewritten mid-sprint	8	No
R2025-03	Account Summary v2	Aisha K.	31-Mar	11-Apr	11	Undefined data fields	3	No
R2025-04	SME Dashboard	Pradeep M.	30-Apr	09-May	9	Conflicting stakeholder inputs	2	Yes
R2025-04	Touch ID Fallback	James T.	30-Apr	27-May	27	Acceptance criteria missing	7	No
R2025-04	eStatement Redesign	Aisha K.	30-Apr	19-May	19	Scope change approved late	5	No
R2025-05	Wealth Dashboard	Pradeep M.	31-May	05-Jun	5	Minor wording ambiguity	1	Yes
R2025-05	Loan Repayment UX	James T.	31-May	30-Jun	30	Requirements not baselined	9	No
R2025-05	CASA Interest Display	Aisha K.	31-May	12-Jun	12	Missing compliance note	4	No

📧Email Thread

From: Chief Technology Officer, Aurora Nexus Global
To: Head of Digital Product & Head of Engineering
Subject: Release Delays: This Is Now a Business Issue

I've reviewed the Q1 delivery report. We shipped 7 of 12 planned features on time. Of the 5 late deliveries, 4 were delayed by requirements issues, not engineering. That is the fourth consecutive quarter where requirements quality is the single largest contributor to delay.

This matters beyond delivery metrics. The Consumer Banking team has been waiting since February for the card limit self-serve feature. Every week it is delayed costs us branch calls and advisor time. I want a root cause analysis and a clear proposal for how we fix this. Not a workaround. A fix.

💬Chat Extract: Digital Product & Engineering Channel

Aisha (BA) 11:15

Touch ID fallback had no acceptance criteria when it came into the sprint. I wrote them in planning and they were changed three times by three different stakeholders.

Reza (Dev Lead) 11:18

By the time criteria were agreed, we had already lost a week.

James (BA) 11:21

PayBills was worse. Requirements were rewritten on day 8 of a 10-day sprint.

Pradeep (BA) 11:24

My last three features had one clarification ticket each and shipped close to schedule. I do a walkthrough with the dev lead before the sprint starts.

Reza (Dev Lead) 11:27

That's the point. It works when we do it right. We just don't do it consistently.

🎯Your Tasks

Analyse the release data and team conversations to identify the patterns behind the delays: which types of requirement failures cause the longest delays, and where do problems consistently cluster across BAs, features, or sprint stages?

Design an ideal requirements and release process for Aurora Nexus Global's digital team, one that prevents ambiguity from entering a sprint and ensures every feature is ready before development begins.

Recommend what ANG should standardise so that Pradeep's approach becomes the team's consistent approach, and what would need to change to make that happen.

📝Your Working File

Your working folder contains 2 files for your team:

📊 BLANK – Promptathon Team Pack: your main working file. Use this to document your prompts, Copilot outputs, and key insights throughout the challenge. You will present from this at the end.
⚖️ Peer Judging Sheet: used during the presentation segment. You will score the other teams while they present their work.

🔗 Open Your Working Folder

Opens in OneDrive. Use Incognito / InPrivate mode.

🕵️

Important: Open the working file in an Incognito (Chrome) or InPrivate (Edge) window. This ensures you are working from the correct shared folder and your work is saved properly.

⚡🔒⚡

Power Ups: Locked

Power Ups are your next step — take what you built today and think about how to bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.
Complete your challenge tasks first, then unlock them here.

⚡ Power Up: Adopt It

You have used Copilot to solve a scenario. Now bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.

1 Pick Your Use Case · 5 min

In Tasks 1 and 2, you found that most release delays trace back to a small set of predictable failure types: incomplete requirements, UAT surprises, and environment issues that were foreseeable but not planned for. You then designed a standardised process that makes those failure modes visible before they become delays. Alliance Bank's technology delivery teams see the same patterns cycle after cycle.

Use cases from digital banking and technology teams at banks like yours. React to these: swap, add, or keep.

Analyse a release log and classify each delay by failure type: requirements gap, UAT failure, environment issue, or deployment error, then identify which type accounts for the most cumulative delay hours
Draft a standardised requirements template for a new feature request, based on the acceptance criteria from the team's last five successful releases
Review a user story before sprint planning and flag missing acceptance criteria, unstated dependency assumptions, or scope boundaries that will cause problems later
Write a post-release review summary from incident notes and team debrief comments, formatted for the delivery retrospective and ready to share
Generate a release readiness checklist for the next release, built directly from the failure patterns in the team's last 10 delivery cycles

As a team, pick your top 3, then paste this into Copilot:

"We work in digital banking and technology at a bank. Here are 3 Copilot use cases we identified: [list them]. Score each on: time saved per week, how often we'd use it, and ease of implementation. Rank them and explain your top pick."

2 Build the Prompt · 5 min

Your winning use case needs a great prompt. Paste this into Copilot:

"For this use case: [describe your winning use case]. What data or input would we need? Write the best Copilot prompt to make this work. Then show a sample output."

Test it. Refine it. Make it yours.

3 Pitch It · 5 min

Draft your adoption pitch:

"Draft a short adoption pitch for our technology delivery manager: what the use case is, what problem it solves, what data or content we'd give Copilot, and what the first step is to roll it out to the team."

This is not your team pack.

Team Pack Locked