How to overcome a Project Disaster? Steve Caseley and Chris Ward wrote an insightful article about the topic on Baseline and we would like to share it with you. They wrote:
Sometimes a project hits a few speed bumps, and sometimes it suddenly crashes into a concrete wall. Here are some suggestions for dealing with these disasters. The ultimate goal for any project manager is to complete the project on time and on budget. And yet, despite our best intentions, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes a project hits a series of speed bumps, and sometimes it suddenly crashes into a concrete wall.
Steve Caseley and I are project managers, and we’d like to share a couple of our personal disaster stories with you, as well as our solutions and the lessons we learned. By doing so, we hope you’ll take something away from our experiences. The first story involved restarting a software upgrade project for a large international bank two-thirds of the way through—which is certainly not a position any sane person wants to be in”.
Steve Caseley’s Challenge:
I was managing a project to upgrade a highly customized convertible bonds trading system for a major international bank. The requirements were straightforward: Upgrade the software and preserve customizations so they could be used in the new release.
The project went very well for the first two trading desks in New York and London. My project sponsor was tightly connected to both desks and had a firm understanding of what customizations had been done. Coincidentally, these were identical for each location.
However, the wheels fell off the bus when we implemented the project at the third trading desk, which was in Hong Kong. We had done a substantial amount of customization for this desk, but many of the changes were unfamiliar to staff members throughout the bank.
We suggested they could modify trading practices to “fit the software,” but that idea fell on deaf ears. “That’s just not how it works here,” we were told.
The end result was that we had to restart the project two-thirds of the way through, and integrate all the changes the third desk needed. We were substantially over schedule and over budget, causing significant operational issues for the bank because it had to keep duplicate copies of the trading system active for an extended period of time.
Ultimately, we completed all the modifications and successfully implemented them into the third trading desk, much to the delight of the local manager.
This great article continues on Baseline, click here to continue reading.