Upcoming Plans for Q12008

2008 is coming around the corner. One of the plans I have is to establish my business opportunities in Asia Pacific and I have been working closely with my partner. Reviewing our past efforts, we have established quite alot in India and Singapore and making big developments in emerging countries like China, Vietnam, Philippines and other parts of East Asia.

The major activities I am working on right now for the first quarter are the BPOs and social entrepreneurship’s business plans, establishing the processes, methodologies and operational activities for the region. The normal activities I am still working on are getting new businesses for the Company.

Understanding the inter-departments’ conflicts in a BPO Company’s Organisation Structure

Understand from my Manager that in most organizations there are always conflicts working with inter-departments. Herewith I have listed the areas that are happening all the while.

1. Sales vs Operations – Salesperson always over quotes the services that Operation is not able to manage after signing contract with Customers
2. Sales vs Finance – After getting the contract signed, Sales person do not care about how payments are made back to the Finance team. As the terms keep on delaying (e.g. after 60 days term), Finance eventually ’stopped’ all services to the Customer and Sales are not happy about it
3. Sales vs IT – As mentioned that sales always over quotes and commits ‘unrealistic’ time lines without consulting IT teams,

Mastering the Art of Agile Project Management

The project I am overseeing is a high-profile and fast-pacing project that do not allows any new functionalities to jeopardize the go-live schedule in the next couple of months. Even at this stage, with the increasing customer’s expectations and the organization may facing cost pressures and there is a need to track and maintain close relationships with the internal staff (stakeholders) and Customer. Likelihood that we have to manage uncertainty and to be able to do more with much less in such environments. This situation always happen in vendor-working environments.

In this environment, we needs to apply agile methods to implement the developments with flexibility, speed and value. Items include looking into iterative releases of some functions or defects as not to compromise the project’s delivery. When coming to reviewing of change requests, we need to understand the Customer’ values on them. No longer are traditional project methods like waterfall models can be applied on todays’ project management. Although systematic project models are still applicable but we have to understand on different situations where projects bring about customer’s values we have to work differently.

I have a chart on the Roles and Responsibilities for Agile Project Management (adapted from the book “Managing Agile Projects” by Sanjiv Augustine)

Roles and Responsibilities of Agile Project Management

User document is released today, errrhhh..where the system requirement list?

Today my manager forwarded me an email contains the information on getting the installation file (about 70MB filesize) and a user guide. From looking at the user guide, it is not what I expected from the deliverable of an user guide. I suppose the user guide also includes system requirement list and the actual step-by-step on using the translation tool at different user levels (a system administrator’s use case and a translater’s user case) beside on the installation steps on setting up the tool. System requirements is important as to understand what are the minimum requirements are needed to get the application installed at the production sites, not to mention we have to take note of the different locale settings used in East Asian countries. This information is also useful as to prepare the onsite personnels to check if their current resources/hardwares are able to support this application.

I was told to go through each of the steps thoroughly and to do the admendments accordingly as our team is to prepare the training material to train the users in the coming month. This is true as we need to fully understand all the features in the system as to manage efficiently in the training, prepare to answer any questions being prompted by the users.

Kick off job-hunting for 2008

Even though I am into my second month of the contract (I am assigned for 6 months’ work contract), I do not want to wait till the contract ends to find a new job.  Nowsaday, job hunting are getting competitive and lots of potential jobs are now publishing on the job sites, newspapers and job agencies.

First step is review my current CV and update with my latest project and fine-tuning on using powerful verbs/adjectives to bring up my skills in the job huntings process.

Managing customer’s expectations

2 weeks ago we had a workshop with the Client, together with vendor B to discuss on the current implementation and questions on the integrations.  In the discussion, we were brought out with a couple of possible scenarios on how we are going to integrate our current solution with the vendor’s WMS.  Through the discussion, we realized the proposed requirements are currently not available in our solution and we have to have a change request to accommodate that change.  Knowing that we are already delayed in the development schedule, the upcoming holidays and no resource to be available to perform gap analysis on those scenarios, I highlighted that we may revert on the outcomes at month’s end or subjected to the offshore team’s analysis.  As what I had thought, this is not acceptable and through minor discussion we (the Client and my Account manager) came up with the 1 week’s time-line to get them updated on the preferred alternative to work on so that vendor B can start off with their development works.

Reflecting on what I had done during that meeting, I should have stood firm and disagree with the proposed time-line for updates.  Somehow, this situation came to myself and the account manager unexpectedly and as the Client is important to the company, we committed to a date.  We should have an informal chat with her, to set up expectations of the outcomes earlier (right now, we are working with them to see what we can come back with as the Customer is not accepting the outcome of the analysis to start next month).

This morning, we had a short chat with the senior management and one thing was brought up that we have to manage customer’s expectations and this come to about committing last week’s time-line that I mentioned earlier on the delivery of the gap analysis.  Although I was not involved in previous management’s discussions, I see that noone has raised up any outcome/resolution in regards on handling this issue with the Customer last week.  Now we start to talk about out-of-scope, additional cost/resources involved etc to react to the Customer’s escalation.  I suppose the management should have agreed to those even before my Manager reverted back to the Customer on last week’s decision and why are we still talking about this today????

Setting right expectations is easy to say than done, especially facing a major Customer’s pressures.  But one thing for such is that no matter what, we should think and react carefully as to protect the Company’s liability in any cases.  In this case, I understand from the discussion that the Customer understands the constraints of resources, the change of scope and other factors (cost, schedule) we have for this new change and they needs to get their vendor to start off the needed developments in order to meet the timeline with mininal efforts from both sides (my employer and vendor B).  We can see that they have to maintain their current processes with Vendor B so the direction given is to provide whatever we deems is accurate and benefit both the Customer and the Company eventually.

In most cases, customers are understanding and they have their own problems, likewise like ours too.  It is all in setting the right expectations and clear out assumptions.  Beside this, we internally have to set up common goals and understanding in the project so that we know what we shall be expecting and adapting to changes quick.  This is what I see lacking in the teams (commonly both business and development teams) when one party is not able to see the business benefits and customer’s values for the project, the other is placing ’overboard’ commitments on our deliveries that results the Customer is always placing high expectations on us.

Understanding my grounds in the project

Being positioned as a vendor in this project, I have to be very clear of the expectations being at that level.  This is totally different in managing an external customer and internal customer.  I do not have the visibility to the contract of the project but there are some terms in which the vendor have to forfeit should any agreed items in the contract is not fulfilled so we have to be careful on the activities we are to commit to deliver.  But at the same time, we need to know what are the scopes being covered for the contract as any changes to the current scopes have to go through certain level of escalations and negotiations between both contract managers from both sides and probably more project costs included with a well-justified business case to support the scope changes.

The above situation does happen for internal customers, just that the project cost remains within the same organisation/Company (‘transferring’ between Cost centers).  Being working with internal customers, we are all moving towards the projects with common objectives to achieve to enhance the Company’s business benefits (not to mention we can easy forgive one another should we made some errors and able talk alot of things).  In a vendor’s working environment, we have to be careful and tactful about what we said as not to jeopedize the Company’s interests.  Details are very important at this level.

Defining Test Plan and Strategy

In preparation for Phase B testing, with the feedbacks from customer and vendors, they request to us to setup the new solution/components onto their production sites so that they are able to perform all the needed testings without going through our IT team to assist to print and review the results.

• China team can only involve in the testing after their daily operation activites which means they can participate after 5pm local time for any testings.  Common issue from previous arrangment (a.k.a manual testing since test files are to send to IT team to upload to our test machine)  is all teams were waiting for each other’s update, resulting time lapse in review and obtain feedbacks from each other on their analysis.  We need to review the overall testing approach, one way is to get our China Support to work longer hours till 9pm local time. 
• As to setup an ‘automatic’ testing approach, we also need to ensure that the integration and UAT testings should not be done on production’s hardwares/existing resources.  This is to protect the current business operations as you will never know what issues may faced during the testing and may impact the production operations which is going to be a very terrible situation to manage.  If going for automatic testing, we need to have a test environment/equipment for all the involved parties/systems.  We need to do thorough study on this to understand what are in-scoped from the testing, based from the experiences from Phase A.

As to the defect management, we need to have at least 2 working days’ effort in a week for the offshore team to fix and deploy the patch to the test environment/equipement before re-testing.  It is not going to be an issue as the offshore team is located in Europe and with the timezone differences, we can communicate to the UAT teams that they will need to perform their testing from Monday – Thursday, with Thursday evening for analysing and prioriting defects and the Friday is left for defect fixing on those to be delivered the following week from our offshore team.

Unrealistic timelines and pressures from Customer

This morning, we have a weekly update with the Customer on the progress for Phase B and like what I have expected, we come into the discussions of 2 critical items – to confirm the testing and deployment’s schedule with China for January and the update on the feasibility study for the vendor. 

For point #1 on the deployment schedule for China, we had highlighted in previous meetings that although we have a pending item to provide the information of the implementation to the China team, they can already start with their development works, not to mention our team is ready to perform unit testing with them in the later stage of our development.  For now, the Customer has been highlighting that the China team can only start off their development upon receiving our information.  In this situation, the Customer keeps on pressuring us for the document and it seems like they are having problems to manage the China team on keep off their involvments as well.  Nevertheless, with the inital timeline of our integration testing with the China team is still focusing on the first week of Jan’ 08.  I have doubts that we are not able to do this testing, with the initial 4 – 5 weeks of development’s effort by the China team in the inital plan, not to mention the efforts to setup the test environment and resources’ readiness especially in this period of festive holidays around the corner.  Back to the point, we have submitted the information to the Customer and now awaiting their update on the schedules for remaining activities (including integration testing)  before end of next week.

For point #2, we had a first kick-off discussion with another vendor (Vendor B) last week.  The whole discussion is focusing on the processes currently in-place between the Customer and Vendor B and derived out some alternatives to see how my employer’s solution is going to support them.  During the discussion, a few items have changed and we have to perform analysis to see if the solution is able to support these alternatives or we are to propose the best solutions to fit into these alternatives and related processes and main point is to enable these changes are consistent with the solution we are implementing without majar impact to daily Business as Usual processes.  At this point of discussion, the IT team is currently busy and using all resources to assist on the solution development and not to mention about the unit testing that we need to perform on before it can be released to me to perform more thorough testings.  Without the resources to do the analysis, in parallel with the solution development, a big concern rises on the possibility of slipping the inital timeline and with my past experiences I will forseen this will come up to be a “NOT ACCEPTABLE” response from the Customer ultimately.  I have gone throught this situation and being in the Customer’s shoes before and therefore there were sounds of ‘frustrations’ coming from their voice as we discussed further.  Probably they may have ‘over-committed’ some of the scopes and ‘overlooks’ some requirements.  My colleagues, on the other hand, are protecting the Company’s liability as not to derive any possible outcomes from the analysis without any inputs from our offshore team as well.  Right now, this issue has escalated to the senior management and they are having discussion later to see what to respond to the Customer.

Again, knowing that all resources are focusing on the delivery of the solution that also means that thorough testings must be fulfilled and commited by the team and the solution, once released must be ‘up-to-standard’ and full commitment from team on defect fixing during the first week of intergration testing (As written, this timeline is still not confirmed if we are able to meet it as need confirmation from Customer).  This is part of a strategy in order for the team to manage the pressures from both the Customer and Sales team, not to mention to support our reasons of not able to perform any analysis work during this period.

Should the outcome is to commit to perform analysis during this period, instead of kicking off in mid-January I will highlight the impacts it will have to the current solution we have done to support China’s team deployment in February and to see who is to be the risk owner to take up this risk impact.  Definately I can’t let IT team to bear all responsibility should anything goes wrong and this is to be highlighted

Defining Training Plan

In preparation for the training of the new double-byte solution, I need to know the resources from operations who are require to do the translation works and their commitments and availablity to be around for the training and UAT.  Currently the resources are known and further communication be known to them in the coming weeks.

Initial training schedule is drafted, tentatively set for 2 working days’ duration for onsite.  In between that, the training agenda is divided into 3 sections – Processes, Functionalities and Service Level Support.  Processes are covering on the shipment cutoff, the shipment despatch for domestic and international parcels for double-byte countries.  Functionalities are covering on the double-byte solution and Service Level support covers on the service level escalations on the possible IT issues faced by this solution.

Next step is to determine the details to cover for the training, including the training materials and setup of the environment for hands-on session.