This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
Background
The project to implement Acme
Corporation’s new warehouse management system was scheduled to take four
months.
At the outset, the project manager
heard that the Acme Corporation had a history of trying to implement systems, getting
them substantially completed, but then not going live on the new system. Most recently, a sales order project had run
for several months, achieved 99 percent completion, and four years later was
still not live due to some small outstanding technical items.
The Situation
For the current warehouse management
project, Acme’s IT department was to do the technical set up of the new server,
and upgrade of mobile devices. The IT team was enthusiastic about what
they had learned at the vendor’s training sessions, but when they returned to
Acme their progress on the technical set up was noticeably slow.
The project manager also observed that
the other employees on the project had little confidence in the IT team.
Technical support, including help desk, was available until only mid-afternoon
daily, and was slow to respond to problems. As a result, most employees felt
that company systems were unstable and interfered with getting their work done.
Follow up with the IT team
The project manager met with the IT
team, who assured him that they were going to get their work done. However, the
work continued to slip, and the project manager escalated to the project
sponsor.
The sponsor assured the project manager
that the IT team would prioritize the warehouse management project work, and get
caught up. However, due dates for technical set up of the new system continued
to be missed, then the due date for go-live was missed.
The project manager suggested that an
outside consultant be brought in to complete the technical work. The sponsor agreed the consultant could be
hired, but wanted Acme’s IT team to use this outside expertise as a training
opportunity, and do as much of the work as possible themselves, under the
supervision of the consultant. Unfortunately,
Acme’s IT team was not comfortable doing
this work, and participated very little, leaving the consultant to perform most
of the set up. When the consultant left, there were only a few technical items
to be completed.
Acme’s IT team did not have the last
part of the work ready on time for the next month, and the go-live date slipped
another month.
Again, the project steering committee
assured the project manager that the IT team would get the job done. Again,
progress was made, but as the next month approached, there were still some
technical items that had not been completed.
Let’s go live
The project manager reviewed the
outstanding items with the project team and determined that it was possible to
go live without the remaining technical items. The outstanding items would
cause some inconvenience, but the problems should be workable.
The project steering committee accepted
the project manager’s recommendation that the system should go-live, two months
late and 99 percent complete.
Conclusion
The Acme Corporation was satisfied with
the implementation of the warehouse management system. It came in under budget
because the costs had been over estimated. In addition, since Acme had so many failed implementations in its past, two months late on a four month project
was an improvement over what they were used to.
Although Acme was satisfied, there is a
lesson for the project manager. He did not recognize a significant project risk
when he heard Acme’s history of inability to implement systems even when they
were substantially, even as much as 99 percent, complete. If the project
manager had probed further, he may have discovered right from the beginning
that Acme’s IT department was weak and unlikely to complete their tasks.
Realizing the IT weakness in the
company would have allowed the project manager to plan and make recommendations
to the sponsor to prevent the problems instead of solving them later in the
project.
In order to raise the IT team’s comfort
with the technical work to be done and make the technical training environment
more realistic, perhaps the vendor’s technical training could have been done at
Acme instead of at the vendor. Another possibility may have been to have the
training customized to provide more hands-on rather than classroom training.
Alternatively, Acme could have planned for the technical consultant to do the
technical work on the project, without trying to have the Acme IT department involved
in the set up of the new system.
Unfortunately, when the project manager
heard the previous disaster stories, he did not recognize the risk they implied
for the current project.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
