Wrap-ups for the Trip

 Although for the past 3 days that I have not achieved my desired outcomes from the discussions with the team for this trip, I have eventually made new action plans and objectives to get things moving to solve the current issues.

 Activities that have been done so far:

1. Explore the possibility of hosting of web service locally and managed by each country IT team.
2. Explore the possibility of a global development’s work on the web services for the affected countries.
3. Expand the resources’ capability to support the development of the ERP system for Country K by drafting out the roles and responsibilities.
4. Review Customer’s functional specification and identify new changes for the project.

Action Plans:

1. Involve the new resources for helping Country K with the gap analysis.  This may probably require a trip to Country K to see their program.
2. Review with the development team on the possibility of developing a web service for all countries.
3. Review the necessary hardware, software involved for the hosting of the web service with countries.
4. Obtain country’s project plan, impacts and activities list on the items they need to work on for the project/solution.  This may result in producing high-level IT costs for evaluation.
5. Request for a consultant whom is familiar with ERP solution to assist Country K in terms of advising or suggesting inputs from gap analysis.
6. Review web tracking tool with global development team on the feasibility to reuse the concept and design for country K.

Clarifications on Business Requirement Document

Before starting any development works, we need to have a Business requirement document that outlines the business case/benefits, processes, technology, functionality, data flows, data modeling involved. 

• Business Case
• Business processes that involves for the new changes
• Functional Specification that involves expected system flows, data model for the new changes.

At times, we are overwhelmed with the detailed contents of the document as this document supposed to compile the overall implementation and processes to be delivered from the desired outcomes.  This often results in not understanding what exactly we should be looking out for that have impacts or new changes to the Operations and systems involved.  In most times, we are always stuck on what questions to ask ourselves when trying to understand the documents.

Questions to ask ourselves:

1. Which existing business processes is/are affected by these new changes?
2. How these changes in the existing business processes affect the system design for the new changes?
3. What new technology is being involved and the resources require to manage this new technology?
4. Which data model/mappings is/are affected by these new changes?  How these changes are affected from the changing business processes.
5. Which users are affected and what types of new training to be involved to cater these changes?
6. How the existing administration of the data are being affected?
7. How the existing Service level support affected by these new changes?

Feedbacks to Management on Projects’ Strategies

Weeks after returning from various business trips, few initiatives were identified before end of this year.  One of the strategies my Organisation is trying to achieve is to identify existing solutions and resources that we have to implement any new initiatives.  The major challenge the Organisation facing is having right resources to perform feasibility in assisting the alignments.  As the Organisation is undergoing major changes, this results in increasing number of IT personnel from regional Organisation leaving the Company for growth.

Suggestion from the Management includes seeking local country’s IT resources to assist on certain areas of the project like system analysing activities.  The involved country can work on the infastructure setups like the procurement for a web server, database setup and user training.  What I am planning to do is obtaining a task list from country on what are the activities they are able to work on, the hardware and softwares’ costs and system specifications.  We also need to identify the IT project leader to oversee the project’s progress and issues.

Hence the things I am going to work on this week for this trip:

1. Analyse new system requirements from the initiated project
2. Work out activities lists from both countries’ resources on what they can offer
3. Identify IT project organisation team
4. Identify issues and action plans for moving forward

Retrospectives on Regional and Local IT organisations

Last week I was away for business to discuss with our Korea IT team on upcoming initiatives with our Customer.  I from a regional organization’s perspective, is to ensure that the requirements, processes and implementation approaches are aligned with efficient, low-cost synergy among the countries.  Interesting facts were discovered in this trip that made me wondering the types of expectations the countries have on us.

Firstly, we went through the information of the Functional Specification document from the Customer to understand what are the new requirements to be developed for the new release.  Surprisingly it was not that no one in the team had ever read the document in details, but the question for requesting the Business Requirement document to understand the processes.  I thought this information should have communicated to the Customer weeks after the initial conference call on this document’s walkthrough and not till when I was there in the country.  This was really disappointing as the team should have highlighted to me even before this discussion and they do not have the initiative to do so.  Hence I offered a hand in following up with the Customer for the request of this document.

Throughout the 3 days’ visit, lots of information was shared with me on the resources’ contraints they are facing in getting a programmer, database administrator and system analyst to manage the gap analysis and system designs for the new functions indicated.  I brought these concerns to my Manager but I was again surprised with the feedbacks that the Korea team should take up these responsiblities, with facts that the regional solution team had done the transition and handover of the system 2 years ago and no resources from regional solution team to assist them.  As a regional team, we should consolidate and define the possible, realistic approaches to solve or minimize the problems encountered but we do not run away from it.  If we are to stand back and let the local team on their own, what is the point of having a regional organisation and what is/are our vision and synergy that I had understand from my job scope?  Again, I believe my Manager has reasons to reflect these comments, utimately to get the local country to be responsible.  I do believe they are certain job scopes at the country level are able to manage and support (e.g. on modifying the reports, network issues) but they might not have the capabilities to perform software development tasks.

I managed to talk to our Director on these issues and alternatives were highlighted and advised by him on the next steps and information gathering with other country IT team so that we can move on the follow-ups to work on and bringing those feedbacks back to regional and country IT teams to evaluate on.

In brief, there are certain level of standardisations to be synergized between the regional and local organisations.  In this case, if we are to let country to develop and maintain the codings by themselves we will have issues on the release managment.  We have to find out what are the general functions to be maintained by regional and which are the customizations at country level can be maintained by local team, that goes for the roles and responsibities’ matrix for each organisation.

Action Plans for Improvements

For the last couple of days, major issues have reported in the projects.  Late feedback received from Customer on the test results on the portion of the data feeds being proceed by one of the system has failed.  The analysis of the root cause of the problem is not due to version control of the program (we have 2 new patches released a week ago) but the requirement has not been properly understood and not even detected during the unit testing.  Feedback from the Customer that the issue has occurred on the very first day of our joint-testings and it has been there since then and no one, even our development team has realised on this.  The requirement document has been shared to them even weeks before the joint-testing and it has been reviewed and discussed even during the conference call with the teams and repeatedly checking constantly with the development team if they have any issues.  This is a very disappointing moment for me to see the poor integrity of the work our Development team produce.

In another project, we are supposed to migrate 2 new change requests to the UAT environment as previously communicated by our IT manager to the Customer yesterday.  When I reached out to them on the progress, the next thing they mentioned to me is to test out these 2 changes on our development environment to see if they are working properly.  First of all, I am shocked we are supposed to migrate them and not in the stage to test on them.  Reviewing the ways of working, we lack of the processes to create prototypes of the requirements to review with Customer on the understanding of the functions that should be working to and doing things on our own ways.  But again, unrealistic time lines/pressure from Customer do not allow us to have the privileges to execute these processes.  We need to have a body, from both organizations, to highlight the importance of methodologies in having concept reviews and good understanding of realistic time lines and requirement gatherings.  Right now, the Customer is unhappy with the solution we providing, with unnecessary recurrence of previous bugs and setup issues during the migration to Production.

Moving forward as the IT Program Manager, I am working on the action plans with the Management from the above incidents on the missing gaps and improvements to be made to ensure we need to do things in the right ways.  As such, for every new project/initiative I am working towards the following items in tracking we have the necessary information to ensure smooth transitions for future projects and minising foreseen impacts as described in the above two paragraphs as much as possible.

1. Resource Plannings/road maps from each functional team
2. Gap Analysis – Functionality/Business Processes/Data/Administration/Operational Support (IT/Business)
3. Business Requirement Document
4. System Design Document
5. Test Plan
6. Deployment Plan/Cut over Plan
7. Service Level Agreement
8. Online Files Repository server to archive all project documents

With the above in mind, we will have to take actions on defining the road maps, resources planning and business continuity plans to fulfill the remaining scopes for each project/solution to work on.  Again, I will need to identify  and make clear of the roles and responsibilities for each team member and no assumption should be made.  All doubts and clarifications are to be made known and if necessary, involve the management team in the correspondences so that everyone is aligned and agree to do what they are assigned to work on.

New challenges are ahead of me and looking forward to manage them