Project Management at MM“We’ve got a real ‘warm puppy’ here,” Brian
Smith told Werner McCann. “Make sure you make the most of it. We could use a winner.
“Smith was MM’s CIO, and McCann was his top project manager. The puppy in
question was Mm’s new venture into direct-to-customer marketing of its green
meters, a product designed to help better manage electrical consumption, and the
term referred to the project’s wide appeal. The strategy had been a hit with
analysts ever since it had been revealed to the financial community, and the
company’s stock was doing extremely well as a result. “At last,” one had
written in his popular newsletter, “we have a company that is willing to put
power literally and figuratively in consumers’ hands. If MM can deliver on its
promises, we fully expect this company to reap the rewards. “Needless to say,
the Green project was popular internally, too. “I’m giving it to you because you
have the most project-management experience we’ve got,” Smith had said.
“There’s a lot riding on this one.” As he walked away from Smith’s office,
McCann wasn’t sure whether to feel complimented or terrified. He had certainly
managed some successful projects for the company (previously known as Mod Meters)
over the past five years but never anything like this one. That’s the problem
with project management, he thought. In IT almost every project is completely
different. Experience only takes you part of the way. And Green was different.
It was the first truly enterprise wide project the company had ever done, and
McCann was having conniptions as he thought about telling Fred Tompkins, the
powerful head of manufacturing, that he might not able to have everything his
own way. McCann knew that, to be successful, this project had to take an
outside-in approach—that is, to take the end customers’ point of view on the
company. That meant integrating marketing, ordering, manufacturing, shipping
and service into one seamless process that wouldn’t bounce the customer from
one department to another in the company. MM had always had separate systems
for each of its “silos,” and this project would work against the company’s
traditional culture and processes. The Green project was also going to have to
integrate with IT’s information management renewal (IMR) project. Separate silos
had always meant separate databases, and the IMR project was supposed to
resolve inconsistencies among them and provide accurate and integrated
information to different parts of the company. This was a huge political
challenge, but, unless it worked, McCann couldn’t deliver on his mandate. Then
there was the issue of resources. McCann groaned at the thought. MM had some
good people but not enough to get through all of the projects in the IT plan
within the promised timelines. Because of the importance of the Green project,
he knew he’d get good cooperation on staffing, but the fact remained that he
would have to go outside for some of the technical skills he needed to get the
job done. Finally, there was the schedule that had to be met. Somehow, during the
preliminary assessment phase, it had become clear that September 5 was to be
the “hard launch” date. There were good reasons for this—the fall was when
consumers usually became concerned with their energy consumption—but McCann worried
that a date barely twelve months from now would put too much pressure on his
team. “We’ve got to get in there first, before the competition,” Smith had said
to him. “The board expects us to deliver. You’ve got my backing and the support
of the full executive team, but you have to deliver this one.
Six Weeks Later
It
was full steam ahead on the Green project. It’s amazing what a board mandate
and executive sponsorship can do for a project, thought McCann, who knew how
hard it usually was to get business attention to IT initiatives. He now had a
full-time business counterpart, Raj Sambamurthy. Samba, as he was known to his
colleagues, had come out of Tompkins’s division and was doing a fantastic job
of getting the right people in the room to make the decisions they needed to
move ahead. The Green steering committee was no Mickey Mouse group either. Smith,
Tompkins, and every VP affected by the project were meeting biweekly with him
and Samba to review every aspect of the project’s progress. McCann had pulled
no punches when communicating with the committee. “You’ve given me the mandate
and the budget to get this project off the ground,” he had told them. “But we
have to be clear about what we’re trying to accomplish.” Together, they had
hammered out a value proposition that emphasized the strategic value of the
project and some of the measures they would use to monitor its ultimate
success. The requirements and design phase had also gone smoothly because
everyone was so motivated to ensure the project’s success. “Linking success to
all our annual bonuses sure helped that! ”McCann had remarked wryly to Samba. Now
McCann was beginning to pull together his dream team of implementers. The team had
chosen a package known as Web-4-U as the frontend of the project, but it would
take a lot of work to customize it to suit their unique product and, even more,
to integrate it with MM’s outmoded back-end systems. The Web-4-U company was
based in Ireland but had promised to provide 24/7 consulting on an as-needed
basis. In addition, Samba had now assembled a small team of business analysts to
work on the business processes they would need. They were working out of the
firm’s Cloverdale office, a thirty-minute drive from IT’s downtown location.
(It was a shame they couldn’t all be together, but space was at a premium at
headquarters. McCann made a mental note to look into some new collaboration
software he’d heard about.)Now that these two pieces were in place, McCann felt
free to focus on the technical “guts” of the sys-tem. “Maybe this will work out
after all,” he said.
Three Months to Launch
Date
By June, however, McCann was tearing out what little hair was left on his head.
He was seriously considering moving to a remote Peruvian hamlet and breeding
llamas. “Anything would be better than this mess,” he observed to Yung Lee, the
senior IT architects, over coffee. They were pouring over the project’s
critical path. “The way I see it,” Lee stated matter-of-factly, “we have two
choices: We can continue with this inferior technology and meet our deadline but
not deliver on our functionality, or we can redo the plan and go back to the
steering committee with a revised delivery date and budget. “McCann sighed.
Techies always saw things in black and white, but his world contained much grayer.
And so much was riding on this—credibility (his, IT’s, the company’s),
competitive-ness, stock price. He dreaded being the bearer of this bad news, so
he said, “Let’s go over this one more time. “It’s not going to get any better,
but here goes.” Lee took a deep breath. “Web-4-U is based on outmoded
technology. It was the best available last year, but this year the industry has
agreed on a new standard, and if we persist in using Web-4-U, we are going to
be out of date before Green even hits the street. We need to go back and completely
rethink our technical approach based on the new standard and then redesign our
Web interface. I know it’s a setback and expensive, but it has to be done. ”How
come we didn’t know about this earlier?” McCann demanded. Lee replied, “When
the standard was announced, we didn’t realize what the implications were at
first. It was only in our quarterly architecture meeting that the subject came up.
That’s why I’m here now.” The architects were a breed apart, thought McCann.
All tech and no business sense. They’d lost almost three months because of
this. “By the way,” Lee concluded,“Web-4-U knew about this, too. They’re scram-
bling to rewrite their code. I guess they figured if you didn’t know right
away, there would be more chance of you sticking with them. “The chances of
that are slim to none, thought McCann. His next software provider, whoever that
was, was going to be sitting right here under his steely gaze. Seeing an agitated
Wendy Chan at his door, he brought the meeting to a hasty close. “I’m going to
have to discuss this with Brian,” he told Lee. “We can’t surprise him with this
at the steering committee meeting. Hang tight for a couple of days, and I’ll
get back to you.“OK,” said Lee, “but remember that we’re wasting time. “Easy
for you to say, thought McCann as he gestured Chan into his office. She was his
counter-part at the IMR project, and they had always had a good working
relationship. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up that we’ve got a serious
problem at IMR that will affect you,” she began. Llamas began prancing into his
mind’s eye. “Tompkins is refusing to switch to our new data dictionary. We’ve spent
months hammering this out with the team, but he says he wasn’t kept informed
about the implications of the changes, and now he’s refusing to play ball. I
don’t know how he could say that. He’s had a rep on the team from the beginning,
and we’ve been sending him regular progress reports. “McCann was copied on
those reports. Their pages of techno-jargon would put anyone to sleep! He was
sure that Tompkins had never got past the first page of any of those reports.
His rep was adweeb, too, someone Tompkins thought he could live without in his
daily operations. “Damn! This is something I don’t need.” Like all IT guys,
McCann hated corporate politics with a passion. He didn’t understand them and wasn’t
good at them. Why hadn’t Samba and his team picked up on this? They were
plugged into the business. Now he was going to have to deal with Chan’s problem
as well as his own if he wanted to get the Green project going. Their back-end
processes wouldn’t work at all unless everyone was using the same information
in the same for-mat. Why couldn’t Tompkins see that? Did he want the Green
project to fail? “The best way to deal with this one, “advised Chan, “is to
force him to accept these changes. Go to John Johnson and tell him that you need
Tompkins to change his business processes to fit our data dictionary. It’s for
the good of the company, after all.” Chan’s strong suit wasn’t her political savvy.
“You’re right that we need Tompkins on outside,” said McCann, “but there may be
a better way. Let me talk to Samba. He’s got his ear to the ground in the
business. I’ll speak with him and get back to you. “After a bit of chitchat,
Wendy Chan left McCann to his PERT chart, trying again to deter- mine the extra
cost in time if they went with the new technology. Just then the phone rang. It
was Linda Perkins, McCann’s newly hired work-at-home usability designer. She
was one of the best in the business, and he was lucky to have snagged her just
coming off maternity leave. His promise of flexible working hours and full
benefits had lured her back to work two months before her year-long leave
ended. “You’ve got to do some-thing about your HR department!” Perkins
announced. “They’ve just told me that I’m not eligible for health and dental
benefits because I don’t work on the premises! Furthermore, they want to
classify me as contingent staff, not mana gerial, because I don’t fit in one of
their petty little categories for employees. You promised me that you had
covered all this before I took the job! I gave up a good job at Life Co so I
could work from home. “McCann had indeed covered this issue in principle with Rick
Morrow, IT’s HR representative, but that had been almost eight months ago. McCann
had indeed covered this issue in principle with Rick Morrow, IT’s HR representative,
but that had been almost eight months ago. Morrow had since left the firm.
McCann wondered if he had left any paperwork on this matter. The HR IT spot had
not yet been filled, and all of the IT managers were upset about HR’s
unreceptive attitude when it came to adapting its policies to the realities of
today’s IT world. “OK, Linda, just hang in there for a day or two and I’ll get
this all sorted out,” he promised. “How’s the usability testing coming along?
“That’s another thing I wanted to talk with you about. The team’s making
changes to the look and feel of the product without consulting me, “she fumed.
“I can’t do my job without being in the loop. You have to make them tell me
when they ‘redoing things like this. “McCann sighed. Getting Perkins on the project
had been such a coup that he hadn’t given much thought to how the lines of
communication would work within such a large team. “I hear you, Linda, and
we’ll work this out. Can you just give me a few days to figure out how we can
improve things? “Hanging up, he grabbed his jacket and slunk out of the office
as quickly as he could before any other problems could present themselves. If
he just kept walking south, he’d make it to the Andes in three, maybe four,
months. He could teach himself Spanish along the way. At least the llamas would
appreciate his efforts! MM could take its project and give it to some other. Poor
schmuck. No way was he going back! He walked furiously down the street,
mentally ticking off the reasons he had been a fool to fall for Smith’s sweet
talk. Then, unbidden, a plan of attack formed in his head. Walking always did
the trick. Getting out of the office cleared his head and focused his
priorities. He turned back the way he had come, now eager to get back in the
fray. He had some things to do right away, and others he had to put in place
ASAP.