This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
Background
The replacement of Acme Corporation’s
equipment maintenance system would directly affect the work of about one-third
of Acme’s work force, and provide data for the daily work of nearly everyone
else in the company.
After the new software was selected,
the implementation project was expected to take nine months.
The situation
Early in the project, the project team
found bugs in the software, but not a lot of them at first. They reported these
bugs to the vendor and obtained incident numbers.
The vendor had a consultant on site setting
up a prototype. Even before timelines started to slip, the project manager
noticed that the consultant appeared to be spending more time on
troubleshooting bugs than on creating the prototype.
In addition, the project manager
recognized that the amount of attention paid to bugs indicated a risk: that the
software may not work as expected and might not be implemented on schedule.
Action taken
The project manager contacted the
vendor and asked for a report on all outstanding bugs, along with a status
update on each one. However, the vendor was unable to come up with such a list.
To the project manager, the inability to produce a status for bugs indicated
that the vendor did not have a good tracking mechanism, and the risk became an
issue that needed to be managed.
The project manager immediately
assigned an analyst on the project team to track all bugs, and arranged a
weekly status call with the vendor. In the status call, the bug list was
reviewed, and priorities were also established, in order to ensure that the
highest priority bugs were fixed first.The tracking of bugs and testing and
installation of fixes became high priority work on the project.
Although bugs were being fixed, more
were found and the overall number of bugs continued to climb. Many of the
defects were also critical – Acme could not possibly implement the system with
these types of problems.
The next one’s better…
The vendor explained that many bugs reported
were already fixed in the next release of the product, and that it would be
faster to install the next release than to continue to fix bugs in the current
release. The timeline was in danger of slipping, so Acme agreed to have the
vendor install the next release.
The vendor installed the next release
of the software, but the bugs were even worse than before. The go-live date had
to be delayed because the software was too defective to implement. Acme was
committed to the software product selected. They decided to have the project
team continue to manage the tracking of bugs and testing and installation of the
fixes.
Outcome
The go-live date was delayed
again. The new system was finally
implemented after thirteen months, four months after originally scheduled. The
cost of implementation was higher than expected due to the number of delays and
amount of re-testing required.
Conclusion
The software selected was well
established in the marketplace, with over forty successful large
implementations of its product. I wonder if Acme relied on
reputation and could have done a more thorough job of checking references. Acme
was committed to the product and probably would have selected it even if it was
buggy. However, more information about the problems would have allowed them to
plan extra time and money for the implementation.
Although the project was completed late
and over budget, the project manager was recognized as having done an
exceptional job of managing the implementation.
For the Acme Corporation, on-time and
on-budget were not the only items to consider in evaluating the success of the
implementation. The early recognition of the bugs as a problem, the immediate
action on tracking and managing bugs, and the establishing of control over the
priorities of the vendor were key to getting the product to run reliably, which
was the most important outcome for Acme.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
