Columbia Grain AI Control Tower: Structuring Delivery Across a Distributed Team

Lolugu joined the Columbia Grain International project at Trisys with a clear objective: improve supply chain visibility by building an AI-enabled control tower that brought together different operational workflows into a single platform. The client was a US-based grain exporter, and the project involved coordinating across developers, QA, business analysts, product owners, and client representatives across time zones.

His first contribution was requirement discovery. He conducted structured meetings with client stakeholders to understand operational pain points, prioritize features, and reduce ambiguity before development began. This helped define project priorities early and gave the development team a clearer starting point.

Building the Governance Structure

Lolugu broke the project into milestones, assigned ownership, created timelines, and managed dependencies. He ran daily standups with developers, QA, and business analysts, covering progress on each module, risks and dependencies, timeline updates, and resource requirements.

He also established a governance cadence: weekly status reports, risk tracking, and early escalation of blockers. Rather than waiting for issues to surface, he standardized reporting and created structured governance that gave stakeholders consistent visibility into delivery status.

Navigating Scope Change

During the planning phase, the team had estimated timelines based on initial requirements. As the project progressed, the client requested workflow changes and additional clarifications that affected the original plan. Rather than continuing with the original schedule, Lolugu worked with the development team and client stakeholders to reassess priorities.

He categorized the requested changes into critical and non-critical items, updated the project plan, and focused first on features with the highest business impact. He also increased the frequency of stakeholder updates so everyone had visibility into revised timelines and understood the trade-offs involved.

The project plan changed, but delivery quality was maintained and the client remained informed throughout the process.