BNI’s team decided to move forward with a Proof of Concept exercise and build a prototype for a public blockchain focused on ESG certification. The biggest challenge to date is to find the right team of developers to build and help with the design of the Blockchain while explaining in simple terms the desired outcome. The next following lines describe the roadmap leading to the final blockchain, the obstacles to overcome and the setup of a method to be the most efficient in the building of blockchain.
1) The beginning of a journey
On the road to push BNI for becoming more popular with all the fans of Blockchain, BNI’s team decided to move forward with the building of a real blockchain, especially a public one dedicated to ESG certification. For the need of this article’s readers, the blockchain project will be labelled as the ‘prototype’.
The team believes that focusing on building and animating a team to design a first version of a ‘prototype’ will greatly contribute to the Blockchain ecosystem and help improve the team’s knowledge of Blockchain functionalities and techniques at the same time. The field on which the prototype is based on is a complex one, but it offers the opportunity to develop a blockchain in a complicated environment and to adapt the methods used to build this blockchain to another field like cryptocurrencies for example.
Besides this complex environment, it remains the prototype must be built on simple concepts to provide it with solid foundations. As the team decided to move forward with the design and conception of the prototype, it is also important the cost of the project was not too expensive in order to stick to the idea of a ‘prototype’ which, in addition, won’t be directly sold to our customers.
2) The organization of the POC
The first challenge surrounding the conception and design of a prototype is to find the right team of developers able to understand the challenges of the POC and to build a suitable strategy aimed at properly building and designing a prototype.
One of the first options to build a network of developers is to call local people to help the team achieve the project. However, there are not enough contacts in BNI’s address book so that the challenge could be locally addressed. More interesting, the team found out that the biggest pool of developers we know is in Asia.
Requests have been sent to the developers located in this part of the world, which has also the advantage to get the most competitive rates for the design and building of the prototype. Talking with our partners, we also discovered that sending a complete and finished set of detailed business requirements is not enough to ensure a good conception of the prototype. Consequently, we will probably have to provide more details and explanations about the many different aspects of our project and the goals we wanted to reach in building the prototype.
During the project, we also discovered that we are not obliged to give the whole assignment to one single developer but that we could divide the task along different suppliers. It is probably more demanding in the management of the whole project, but we think we can earn flexibility and a better result for our prototype.
3) The details of the roadmap
We considered dividing our roadmap into different sections as described as below:
– Once the business requirements have been written, identify the right teams of developers and provide them with the detailed requirements
– Organize kickoff meetings with developers in order to explain the whole project and to convince them to join the adventure
– Once a dedicated team has joined the project, organize explanatory meetings with the developers to explain the project goals and proper details.
Regarding the timing of the project, no definite schedule has been drawn for the final building of the prototype. In theory, programming a first version of the prototype could take between one and two weeks. In practice, there is not current hurdle for developers to take a few weeks more in order to develop the prototype.
After the first reviews with developers, some unexpected hurdles should appear regarding the feasibility and costs associated with the project.
At first, it appears there is a huge entry cost just to set up the blockchain infrastructure (that means without adding the cost of the smart contract containing the compliance and benchmark tables). Secondly, it appears difficult to translate the business needs relating to ESG standards into technical standards and orientations for technical teams, just based on the written requirement.
Consequently, additional work meetings will be necessary to provide the developers with the key information to achieve their programming goals. A final consequence will also be to inflate the entire cost of developing the prototype.
