Good evening Toastmaster of the evening and fellow toastmasters. Today I am going to explain the recovery of an IT project at my work.
Last year April, I was asked by the customer to join a
management meeting, in that meeting I was told that the client project manager
wants to scrap the project as our team at offshore was not able to deliver even
a single delivery as planned in the last one year. He requested the money spent
on this project to be considered as sunk cost to his management as he doesn’t
have confidence to deliver the project by December.
The customer has already spent more than a million dollars on
that project. His management was totally surprised and afraid of the
consequences from their senior management. If we go and tell the management
that we are incurring a million-dollar sunk cost, then it will raise various
questions on their management capabilities as well as us.
To save the face, we told the customer that we will analyze
the root cause of this issue and come up with Go To Green plan. I started
working on the root cause analysis. I started having extensive discussions with
the customers and our team members and documented the issues and sorted them
into the highest priority order. Some of the key issues identified are
1.
There is no dedicated offshore project manager
for the 15-member team. Since we operate in Time and material mode, the
customer thought that they could control the team from onsite directly.
2.
There is no dedicated technical lead who knows
the existing system and helps the team with any queries.
3.
Requirements are not clear from the developer
perspective.
4.
The current lead at onsite was overloaded and
not able to reply to the team’s queries on time.
5.
Daily scrum calls are extended for hours, and
the total daily meeting hours are around 3-4 hours on average due to various
reasons, and it completely spoiled the team’s productivity.
6.
Daily extended working hours and weekend work have
affected the team’s morale.
Due to all these issues, the team morale is low, and senior
resources want to move out of this project.
Against these issues, we started writing our action plan.
Dedicated project manager at offshore, Business system analyst at onsite and
offshore for requirement clarity, dedicated technical lead at onsite. We
presented this to the customer & the customer was convinced of the
identified issues and the action plan from us. We projected the final release
date within December with phased monthly releases in the subsequent months.
The only constraint we faced was that the customer clearly told
us that they couldn’t pay for additional resources as they already burnt more
than a million dollars into this project.
So, we had many discussions internally with our management
and were convinced to invest non-billable resources in this project as part of
our recovery plan but ensured that the profit margin won’t go below standard.
Our management also agreed, and we added one Business System Analyst at onsite
and re-mapped existing lead at offshore as project manager and added a
replacement for him. We also added one Business System Analyst at offshore. I took control as PM from
onsite.
We started strictly adhering to Scrum ceremonies. We ensured
that the daily scrum meetings do not go beyond 20-30 minutes. Requirement walkthrough
sessions are recorded and kept in the common repository for future reference.
Requirement clarification queries from the team are properly addressed and the
members started enjoying the work. We ensured to avoid weekend work and
extended work hours to have the work-life balance. We also introduced a
bi-weekly session on “Get to Know your team” where every team member will
present about themselves nothing about the work. This session played an
important role in getting to know each other and it really gelled the team
together. The team members loved these sessions as they started hearing
different life paths & ambitions of their colleagues.
The timelines for the phased releases are very tight so that
even one slippage could push the project end date to the next year which the
customer doesn’t want. We all stick to the plan though we had minor hiccups in
the releases. At the end of December, we have done all the releases as planned.
It is a great achievement for all of us who planned meticulously and worked
very hard for this.
What I learned from this project are.
1.
Members in the team should enjoy working on the
project.
2.
The leader of the team should enable the camaraderie
within the team.
3.
Psychological safety should be provided so that
the team will not be afraid of taking risks and showcase it as a safe
environment.
4.
Key roles/Bottle necks of the project should be
identified and addressed as early as possible.
5.
All the leaders within the project should be
allowed to take decisions in their capacity considering the project objective
and timeline.
Over to the TMOE!
