This is a true story. The company names
have been changed.
The project manager gets in the middle
Acme Corporation, a large financial
institution, decided to eliminate its personal credit card business to focus on
commercial customers. As a result, Acme agreed to sell its database of customer
information to a competitor.
Standard Consulting was engaged to
extract the customer data and transform it into a format that the competitor
could load into its own system. The competitor was creating a new marketing
database system, and had hired a team of developers to build it for them.
Acme’s project manager estimated that
it would take Standard about four months to complete the work.
Acme’s management was concerned about the
possibility of disclosure to the competitor of any data in the database beyond
the specific customer data that had been sold.
To alleviate management’s concern, the Acme project manager decided to
act as the communication channel between Standard and the competitor. The consultants
from Standard could not speak directly with the competitor or with the
competitor’s development firm. Instead, they directed their questions by email
to the project manager at Acme. Then the Acme project manager would obtain an
answer from the competitor and direct it back to Standard.
The communication process was
cumbersome and time-consuming. Because the questions and answers were all
exchanged by email, there was no opportunity to ensure that the receiving party
completely understood the question being asked and as a result, it would
sometimes not be answered satisfactorily. Follow-up questions were needed, and
the process was repeated.
Because the competitor’s marketing
database was still being developed, some data requirements were still changing,
resulting in changes to the extraction programs being built. Sometimes these
changes were not communicated to Standard via Acme quickly enough and as a
result, test migrations of data would fail.
The project manager had other
responsibilities, so answers to questions, and follow-ups for changes or issues
were slow. The project ran late, but still the process continued. Some issues required significant
analysis and discussion between Standard and Acme’s competitor, but all of
these took place via email through the Acme project manager.
Well into overtime
The project had now run for twelve
months instead of four, and still it was not finished. Acme’s management was
concerned that it might be sued by the competitor for non-delivery of the
customer data. The Acme project manager was replaced.
The new project manager met with the
Acme and Standard teams to develop a comprehensive list of outstanding tasks
and new dates by which the tasks needed to be done.
In addition, she had brief team
meetings every day. At the daily meeting, the tasks due that day were
determined to have been completed or to have slipped. If a task had slipped,
remedial action was taken immediately. Representatives of the competitor
attended part of the meeting by phone, so that questions, answers, and outstanding
issues could be resolved immediately.
The project finished after sixteen
months, a full twelve months later than the original estimate of four months.
Acme’s competitor did successfully load the customer data into the new
marketing database system, and Acme did not get sued.
Conclusion
The original time estimate for the work
was much too low. The Acme project manager did not realize the impact on the
timeline of having so many parties involved in the process. Project managers
who have successfully delivered multi-party, multi-location projects are
painfully aware of how time-consuming the coordination effort is. Anything that
can be resolved in an hour with one company involved can easily take ten hours
with three parties involved. There is significant effort in the scheduling,
discussion, resolution, and follow up for every issue. This data migration project
had four parties: Acme; Standard; the competitor; and the competitor’s
development team. Dealing with multiple locations is also time-consuming, as
the immediacy of face-to-face contact is lost. Sometimes, when the related team
is not physically present, the local team forgets to keep the off-site team up
to date. This project had two locations, one with Acme and Standard, and
another with the competitor and its development team.
Although the estimate of four months was too low, the project should not have taken sixteen months. The communication process designed by
the original project manager was rigid. However, it might have been made
workable by assigning that liaison role to someone else. Because the project
manager had other responsibilities, the management of the communication process
often fell to a lower priority and caused project delays.
The project manager should have placed
a resource in that analyst/communication role full time. That analyst should have been given the
authority to speak with both parties by phone and in person, in addition to using
email correspondence. This would have improved the response time to questions
and issues considerably. It also would have reduced the number of times that
emails went back and forth between parties who were trying to understand the
issue well enough to get it resolved. Key hiring criteria for that analyst role
would be verbal and written communication skills, organization, documentation
(to capture decisions and agreements), and ability to prioritize issues. The cost of that one additional person
on the job would have been significantly less expensive than running the
project so late.
When it was clear that the project
tasks and issues were not being completed on time, the new project manager did
the right thing by ensuring very frequent meetings to review completion status
and follow up.
The new project manager also brought the
competitor to the status meetings, a step that helped immeasurably in getting
issues resolved quickly.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
