The fairytale anatomy of a successful IT project

“A fairy tale is a lie, yet it hints at a lesson for the wise.” We've all heard this phrase since childhood. It's believed that fairy tales hold the answer to any question. How often do we find that real-life situations resemble fairy-tale plots, and the people around us — villains, princesses, and other fairy tale characters? But what if we look at an IT project as a hero’s journey and map its stages to the events commonly found in fairy tales?

This talk draws on Morphology of the Folktale by V. Propp, suggesting that all fairy tales follow a structured set of functions performed by characters — much like projects follow defined stages and roles. This theory is used in cinema and politics, and we will apply it to the real-life work of a business analyst. We will examine the parallels between The Frog Princess and dashboard development, and uncover practical benefits of this model to improve communications with the client and reduce the chaos of requirements, based on a real-life case.