This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
Background
Acme Corporation’s offices and
operations weres located in a small village pretty much in the middle of
nowhere, accessible only by charter aircraft.
During the planning stage for their new
system, Acme’s location had been discussed at length. Acme’s sponsor was
concerned that technical support for the new software and hardware would be
slow and delay the implementation if any problems occurred during the project.
As a result of these concerns, it was
decided that the project should be run in a nearby city. The Acme employees on
the project team would leave their regular jobs and re-locate to the city for
the duration of the project. Technical support was readily available in the
city, eliminating the lag time of chartering aircraft for technical support.
An added benefit was expected, that Acme
employees would be physically removed from their usual work and able to focus
on their project work. This should lead to less time required by the
consultants, trainers and data conversion specialists, and therefore lower
costs.
The situation
Early on in the project, timelines
started slipping. The Acme team members were coming to the city unprepared for
the next stage of the implementation.
The project manager probed to find out
why these problems were occurring. Acme’s remote location turned out to be the
problem. It had not been possible to fill the Acme team members’ regular jobs
at the office, as it was an extremely small town with no other qualified
individuals that could be hired. As a result, when the Acme team members went
back to the office to gather information for the next step in the project, they
had to do their regular jobs instead.
Options
The project manager worked with the
project team to evaluate the available alternatives.
The options considered were:
(a)
Change scope;
(b)
Move the deadline;
(c)
Add resources.
The team felt it was unhelpful to
change the scope of the project. Implementing only some of the modules instead of
all of them would require either a lot of manual processes or custom-designed
interfaces. This interface design work would need to be done by the same Acme
team members who were overworked already. So, reducing the scope of the project
would actually eliminate very little or no work.
It was clear that the deadline would be
missed by at least a month, because timelines had already slipped a month and
the project schedule had been tight to start with. The team considered whether
moving the deadline any further would really be helpful. They felt that unless
it moved a long way, they still would not have time to devote to the project -
the business still had to function. However, the team felt it was very
important to avoid missing the go-live date by any more than the one month.
Adding resources looked like the only option.
However, Acme had no resources. They didn’t have any other internal staff to do
the work, and had been unable to hire anyone else due to the remote location.
The only way to add staff was to add external resources, by increasing the
hours of the consultants.
The team also believed that it would be
better for the project work to take place at the Acme office. This would allow
the consultants to obtain information directly from other Acme staff members,
instead of waiting while the overloaded Acme project team members coordinated
the information gathering.
Adding the extra consulting time would
require an increase to the budget to cover increased consulting fees, and for
travel for the technical person when support was required.
The project manager reworked the
project plan and the budget. She presented them to the project sponsor, and the
changes were approved.
Epilogue
The new approach worked; the
consultants were able to obtain information directly once they were relocated
to the Acme offices. Fortunately, there were very few technical issues after
the team moved to Acme’s office.
The project did finish one month late.
However, no further time delays occurred. The project team had not been able to
save money by implementing in the city. However, the new project budget, based
on the remote town implementation, was met.
The project sponsor was pleased with
the outcome. Although cost-conscious, he had been more concerned about the
slipping deadlines and possibility of further lengthy delays.
Conclusion
The lack of resources in the remote
location should have been considered during the planning process. Some creative
approaches to recruiting may have enticed resources to move to fill the temporary
roles.
However, once the project was underway
and deadlines were being missed, the project manager needed to focus on
evaluation of alternatives and getting the project back on track.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
