The fix was not more money.

A few months after I joined a regulated wagering company, I asked my team for capital budget ideas. One of them was more development money for an application an outside vendor was building for us. Most of the original budget was already spent.

I asked for a demo and asked the team what they thought. The answer was simple. It didn't work.

We built a punch list together. Then, I looked at how we got there. Some of it was on our side. The person managing the project had never run a development project like this, and the spec was never really written down. Some of it was on the vendor's side. They had built without clarifying what they were delivering.

I met with the vendor, acknowledged fault on both sides, and asked for one thing: fix the items that were blocking my team before I go ask for more money. They agreed to put in the time at no charge, and they did. We had also scoped out some enhancements, and they provided preliminary quotes. Then, I requested the capital for the next year.

We rolled out the application to our internal teams. Under moderate use, there were stretches when it took a minute or longer to respond. It felt like a database problem, so I brought in a DBA from our parent company. He put a query analyzer on it for one day. That was all it took: a couple of table indexes were missing. The vendor was skeptical until they saw the logs, and then they fixed it the next day.

The application handled race-day simulcast scheduling: which tracks' races each customer wanted to carry and take wagers on. My team used to set that up by hand with every customer, and mistakes happened. Once the application worked, we trained customers to manage their own schedules. It freed up a few hours a day, and my team only stepped in when something went wrong.

I went back for capital the next two years to keep expanding it, and a solid working relationship with the vendor's owner came out of it.

Two things fixed that project, and neither was more money. One was being honest about who owned which part of the problem. The other was knowing where to look, and bringing in the right set of eyes to find the root cause of the issue.

If you have a project asking for its next round of funding, what would you fix before you approve it?