As a follow up to a prior post regarding the toolkit of things you take with you throughout your career, this one is a "no brainer," but nonetheless the project team got caught up with it.
It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine's friend Jean-Paul was staying with Jerry the night before running the NYC Marathon. Jerry and Jean-Paul were at Monk's Diner discussing why he missed the prior marathon.
Back to my story....
I was working in the PMO of one of the "Big 4" firms, on a number of key projects. One in particular was the upgrade to a global knowledge management platform which provided knowledge to the internal associates, and to their clients on a subscription basis. Given the lean project team, I was asked to not only manage the project, but also to help out as a technical business analyst. The project had its challenges, but we were able to overcome them. And given the nature of the application, and the value to the firm and its customers, it was high profile.
Our schedule had a late January completion date but the team and stakeholders agreed to a mid-February upgrade/go-live. This allowed the team to go through at least 2 mock-upgraes to get ready for the actual go-live. This was a global team, with key members in the US, Europe, and Asia. The project plan had an extremely detailed WBS leaving no task in question.
Or so we thought.
When it came to do the upgrade, everything went extremely well. The plan was followed step by step. Team-to-team hand-offs occurred as expected. Communications to all stakeholders were sent. After 11 hours, the team declared victory.
So what did we forget?
One aspect of the enterprise software was a batch process to move knowledge content from certain systems into others. This would be run typically at 11 PM ET (2300h). The team member who was responsible for this was in Europe and configured the process to be run at 11 AM ET. The actual team member responsible for this was on vacation (er, Holiday) at the time and while the task list was reviewed as part of a transition plan, this level of detail was missed. While this didn't compromise the system stability, it impacted when content was made available. After a bit of research, we were able to fix it. The project plan was updated afterwards to emphasize the correct time parameters.
The moral of the story is that the details are important... and take nothing for granted. While some may accuse you of having too much detail... if it leads to success, then afterwards you'll be the hero.
Commenti