My first project in the US was to help stabilize a project that was drowning in modifications and that had missed a series of go live dates as the team struggled to get a handle on the requirements.
The project was to implement the ERP system for a tile manufacture in Florida with distribution centers in Kentucky and Georgia. As part of the sales cycle a number of modifications had been promised to support RF warehousing as well a tailored order entry system. Most of the development had been completed in the UK and then installed on site with little integration testing. A team had been working on site for a number of months trying to stabilize the system and as part of a second phase i had been drafted in to help support the project.
For me there were many lessons learned from this project both as a contributor and then more significantly as I was tasked with leading the project back from the edge.
First the project went live due to pressure from the customer before the software was obviously ready and the project manager bowed to that pressure. A number of outstanding issues which seemed manageable at time and that were down played caused significant problems that bought shipments to a halt and trucks were lined up out of the plant waiting to be loaded. The team on site worked round the clock trying to fix the problems directly in production while gettign new requirements from the customer.
One of my first acts after taking over as project manager was to move all the developers into a trailer in the parking lot and create separation from the customer so we could focus on stabilization and put a hold on new requirements. The prime directive was to ensure orders were entered correctly, the right shipments went out of the door on time and were invoiced correctly. It took 4 weeks of hard labor to get the system stabilized and then the development team took to the forklifts to support and help conduct a physical stock take to allow the customer to get their business back under control.
The sense of team spirit grew as we manage to continue to get small wins and to turn the customer around. It was great to see the team keep volunteering to return to see the project through to completion and slowly we won the respect of the customer senior management and the users in general as they began to believe in the system. It really helped for the customer to see us as part of their team as we addressed not only with the system issues but helped them deal with process issues and actually helped them with their business issues. We still made a lot of mistakes as we tried to balance new requirements against fixing issues and keeping the customer happy at all levels. We over committed certain deliverables and skipped a lot of training and process issues as we focused on the software and in hind sight a lot of those training and process issues eventually came back to haunt us.
The project moved towards completion and we rolled out the solution to all of the distribution centers but as the team broke up and I moved on to take on new projects the customer again ran into problems and ultimately the relationship again turned sour and we lost what could have been a very successful reference account.
