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June 13, 2002

TOWARD THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE

Beyond the Department

Intelligent project management is your best course when deploying global, multitiered strategic business apps

By Sudhi Sinha

Continued from Page 1

The recommended strategy to counter this problem is to draft a central technical task force. This group will ensure the compliance of each site's technical environment with the corporate standards and their uniformity. Entrusting this group with establishing the environment set-up for sites will best accomplish this task. This arrangement will also substantially separate technical staff requirements for individual locations and make maintenance easier, because a central repository of technical knowledge will now exist.

This approach can introduce bureaucracy, however, and run the risk of slowing down the project. But proper communication and education can eliminate strife among the program office, technical task force, and site leadership. For example, allowing the sites to review task force activities and effectiveness will help improve the group's functioning and avoid turf wars.

Division of Responsibility

You rarely find a project that has surplus budget, allowing any number of resources to participate in development and implementation. Much more commonly, it's a challenge to organize the work required for implementation in all the different sites with a limited number of resources in the project team.

More often than not, a project team will have specialists in particular technologies or business areas. If the scope is only one location, members of the team can easily complement each other. When multiple locations are scheduled for implementation, specialists responsible for particular areas can become overburdened — while a lot is going on with the team, each member can become restricted to his or her "corner," allowing no opportunity for personal growth.

Thus, the project manager has a tough time assigning priorities. With too much responsibility for planning and monitoring, the project manager struggles with time management, and consequently, the team lacks direction. This situation leads to overall dissatisfaction in the team, and performance and delivery are adversely affected.

One solution is to take the vertical/horizontal approach. In this approach, each location is assigned a delivery leader from within the project team. Delivery leaders are responsible for all planning and communication with the site and ensure that all the project components are implemented for their territories. They set the priorities and schedules and have control over the site's horizontal breadth. (They'll involve other experts from the team for delivering the different components.) Each person will also have the vertical responsibility of a particular technical or business component of the project. Any changes or enhancements to this defined module are the delivery leader's responsibility.

The vertical/horizontal approach lets each member of the team gain complete control of the project while becoming proficient in a particular field. With these bidirectional responsibilities involved, redundancies develop and the team matures individually and collectively; everybody gets the opportunity to assert authority and feel its pain. As a result, collaboration among the team increases.

If you take such an approach, however, you have to ensure that project managers set and monitor only the overall goals of the team, making their management experience less distressing. Overall, project managers get the opportunity to concentrate on more strategic issues and better negotiate with management and site leadership, as well as become more valuable working members of the team.

Change Management

However good design, development, or implementation may be, changes in the course of a project are inevitable. For multitiered implementations, changes become a matter of grave dispute because every potential change has some impact somewhere and threatens to destabilize the delicate balance of a common design.

For example, for cleaning up certain purchasing transactions, a manufacturing plant might decide to make its inactive items "transactable" as opposed to the established rule of nontransactable. This change may introduce bugs in the functioning of other plants transactions because they don't share the same need for a cleanup. Most important, you must decree a rigorous procedure for centralized change control. The change board should have representation from all the sites and should be led by senior managers of the program office who have executive control of the project and visibility of the full implications of proposed changes. Any change request should stipulate stern justification citing business and financial rationale.

The requestor should be charged with creating the roadmap for implementing the change, but execution should be the jurisdiction of the program office. All changes should be reviewed by the change board post-facto. Change metrics should be periodically reviewed to identify the high-frequency change subject areas and assess if the change drivers are deep-rooted and require another look at the design or business rules. In extreme cases, a location might have to be excluded from the project's purview for its perpetual differences.

Cultural Communication

Most of us are so accustomed to a particular way of thinking and working that anything contrary seems improper. But we're all equally entitled to our individual social and work cultures.

Multitiered implementations in today's global business environment incessantly run into multicultural situations. Lack of appreciation for cultural diversity spawns misunderstandings that interfere with the functioning of the larger project team, including the sites. Such misunderstandings create mental barriers among the participants.

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The obligation of smooth cultural communication lies on every party involved. Nonwork-related group activities and team games have been known to break many barriers. Social interactions in the team also augment building bonds among members, making them feel connected to the group and insuring their dedication and commitment for the project objectives. In a homogeneous group, people feel more comfortable and tend to be less attentive to others' sensitivities. In a heterogeneous group or groups, more sensitivity is required.

Worth the Challenge

Managing the implementation of multitiered, strategic business apps is a challenge, but one that's becoming extremely common. The experience can even be fun if properly organized. Just be sensitive to the big picture, pay attention to details, and stay focused on your final objectives.

Sudhi Sinha [sudhisinha@hotmail.com] is an enterprise systems consultant for Tata Consultancy Services (www.tcs.com). He specializes in implementing multitiered ERP and BI systems.