Organisation’s Directions – Where are they?

It has been a 1 year’s anniversary of my employment with this current employer.  Since the day I took up the job position, I had not been involving or work on any of the job scopes that were indicated for this role.  All the while I had been “fire-fighting” production issues, managing on-going projects for others to get things move on.  Non of the things are working on the new initiatives and the directions on how to start off these initiatives as well.

At some points I were wondering what is the role of the regional IT organization and in order to do our parts on the new initiatives and business-IT alignments regionally do we really understand the changes on the cost-effectiveness, cost strategy among individual country IT organization, resource allocation and skills’ upgrade, roles and responsibilities of local country IT organizations, reporting structure, in-house IT support service and policies etc.  It was so embarrassing in one occasion with the business support team that we in the regional team do not know the exact scopes and charging mechanism of the SLA agreement imposed from each local country in which in return is charged back to our business unit for yearly IT support and maintenance’s contract with the Customer.  This is really very disappointing.

With the new goal-settings defined by my Manager for this year’s Key Performance Index (KPI), I do hope I have a clearer picture of the Organisation’s directions and alignments to make myself moving forward to achieve these objectives.  I pray so….

Preparation for Project Post-Mortem Review

Before I am going away for my well-deserved 1.5 week’s vacation, I had an performance/objectives assessments for Year 2009 with my Manager.  One of the objective is to prepare a post-mortem review for the recent project that went live early this month.

To think about the template and contents to cover for this review, this is like a session on the lessons learnt from the teams’ experiences, what we have done right and share with others, what we have done wrong and how we should improve from it.  In most projects’ post-mortem reviews, most people do not like to bring the things that they had done badly partly due to the no one is ready to accept the facts.  The typical topics are usually on improper scope control management,  mis-communications on the project team members’ roles and responsibilities, improper risk management and escalations process for stakeholder’s decision-makings.

This is what I have in mind for the post-mortem report:

1. Project Summary
2. What we have done right and how to improve further
3. What we have done wrong and how to improve further
4. Outstanding Issues to review for project closure
5. Action Plans for moving forward

Creation of A Sales Order’s Manifest

Recently after the project gone live, we have issues with the missing information that results our destination hub not able to have the necessary document to clear the arrived shipments at the Customs that shipped out from our Origin hubs.

Through the investigations, we found out that we have missing “electronic” Manifest feeds from the Customer’s interface that links up to our Origin hub’s system.  We are unable to resolve and get these manifests on-time (within 2 hours’ resolution) and by that time we need to uplift to the trucks and deliver to the carriers for uplifts.  We are not able to cancel the carrier’s planned flight and unable to book any advance slots for the next day’s ship-out with the carriers when the electronic manifests feeds are available to us only on the following day.

When we are carrying out our investigation, I come to understand the exact processes for creating the manifests to see if there is any process or system gaps that may result the delay of the creation of a manifest or otherwise.  Herewith I have dropped down a few points on the process.

1. Customer has made a Sales Order and confirmed the order.
2. Information of the Sales Orders is provided to the respective Plant for assembly.  The Sales orders contain the purchasing items, the customer’s information like contact number, billing address, ship-to address, any special instructions, planned delivery date etc.
3. No Sales Order information is transferred to the plants without all the mandatory information being filled up and processed properly.
4. Once the assembly is done, the manifest is created with reference to the sales order.  The assembled item is packed with the shipping documents that includes the manifest and sale order, release to the respective carriers to pick up and transport to the respective hubs.

“Basic” Documents for Project or System Handover

In all other projects, when in the preparation of handover from the project or a system to the support service organization we need to prepare the “basic” documents in order for the support team to take over from the project.

Herewith are the basic documents to be done:

1. Service Level Agreement Document
2. System Guide
3. Support Guide
4. Change Request Management process
5. Support Process
6. Handover Checklist
7. Outstanding Issue List
8. Business-IT Contact List
9. Project Document Repository Portal (where all the project documents are kept for future references)
10. Business Continuity Plan (optional, depends on the business nature/organisation of the company)

Something is going wrong with the workshop agenda

After couple of months reviewing the business narrative, we have come back to the beginning stage that we lost track of the whole receiving process of the shipments’ handling for our warehouses.

We are working towards state diagram to inter-relate each operation process and the web service call for each stage.  The problem is who should be the right person to provide this information.  In this morning discussion, everyone has a different view and opinion of the achievements to make for the upcoming the agenda for Country A’s workshop.  We need to include the objectives to be achieved at each timetable and the overall outcome from the workshop so that the participants in that workshop know what they need to prepare before coming into the meeting room.

All of us are stuck with the business narrative, trying to map each paragraph to the exact process flows for each stage of inventory receiving, control, despatch etc, the full end-to-end flow for warehouse management.  We are now worried that the document is incomplete, without knowing if the Operations are aware and comfortable with their defined “To-Be” processes to cater for the new requirements.

With the timeline drawing near, we are not sure how much we can push the country to provide as much updates to the business narrative in order for us to start working on solutioning.   We just have to go along with the flow and do what we can for now.

Misunderstandings at Work…so it is?

I saw this interesting articles on what are the types of misunderstanding to avoid: http://www.builderau.com.au/strategy/career/soa/10-ways-to-avoid-misunderstandings-at-work/0,2000063986,339295027,00.htm

In the office environment, the misunderstanding in work is not just based on memos, meeting requests or phone calls.  Sometimes the other party is just unwillingly to accept any additional responsibility to their current workloads.  People who are staying long in a Company just want to work 9-to-5 hours, relaxing and getting their salary at every month’s end.

Just refer to my current working environment, I have an pending activity from another colleague in the other department to get back on the project road map and alignments with the Customer and countries.  For all the emails, and meeting correspondences for the activity I have been included him in the loop but he still “acts” at though he is not too clear on the situation.  Even on a certain day we caught up each other on the road (he was the one who waved at me first) and we chatted very attentive to this problem but when the issue has escalated, he seems like he was not in the picture of the all things at all!  Probably I am being too sensitive to these matters but I feel that at that point, everyone is pushing the matter to my hands in which I am not able to assist on.

The best way to clear this up is always, always to follow up with a face-to-face meeting or phone call after addressing the problem/issue onto memos or emails so that everyone is clear on what they are suppose to look out or follow up on the matters.

Ajax Implementation and Data Refresh from Database

We are working on enhancements to the search optimization of an online order management system.  The suggestion to work on Ajax implementation was on hold during earlier discussion with the Customer as  due to the complexity of the reference search page particularly on the pagination links and its navigation to other screens.

We have identified the benefits of Ajax implementation for the current application as follows:

1. The search criteria refresh can be avoided on upon clicking on Search button.
2. The Search criteria refresh can be avoided on upon clicking on the page number links in the pagination.
3. Look and feel of the web portal is being maintained as it is.
4. Facilitate the multiple characters search from the drop-down list boxes.

We also analyzed the data refresh from the Database upon clicking  of the page number hyperlink in the pagination.  The current system works in the way that after the results are retrieved and when the user clicks on  of the pagenumber hyperlink in the pagination , it executes the query to the database and then the results are retrieved.  We do not stored the complete result set i.e 2000 rows into the session memory.  In general data storage in the session will improve the performance but due to the Tomcat memory’s limitation, the system may run into ‘Out of Memory’ error and also to consider the number of the cocurrent users are high in the long run.  As such, we suggested to the Customer to stay on with the current logic and work on the infastructure upgrade instead.

Implement New Order Type for Cross-Docking

When comes into program’s road-map to determine potential alignments with the Customer.  We have a few new implementations, communicating from all difference sources from the Customer.  We have to have a central contact or a regional alignment personnel to synchronize the initiatives as to manage the IT cost and resources’ availability more efficiently as to align to our Global management’s directions.

For this case, we have 2 new orders types from Customer that are to be handled by our countries’ warehousing operations.  This new initiative impacts the current operations’ processes and the WMS system that we have to manage the inventories and cross-docking operations for this Customer.  The areas that I am working on to fill up the gaps on this implementation are as follows:

1. Understand the source of the order shipment (vendors, 3PLs etc)
2. Where the shipment is going to be lifted from to the destination Hub
3. The receiving process at Origin/manifests
4. Commerical invoices from source
5. The format of the shipping documents
6. The packing labels/Carrier logics
7. Update of shipment milestones
8. Update of shipment delivery dates via Call Center
9. Financial/billing methodology for this order type
10. Freight Management

I am not sure what other areas I may be missing to perform the gap analysis but I believe the above almost covered 80% of information I need to assess on.  Hope whoever see this blog can advise me further what else I need to take note of

Webservice Call Problem

The web service project has finally gone live over the weekend.  Connectivity testing was performed from all 4 sites, uploaded tens of records into the Warehouse Management System and everything was fine and sign-off to move to Production.

Today, thousands of records for Australia were unable to proceed further from the Customer’s web service.  We went to troubleshoot on the network performance, system processing time, acknowledgment responses time etc but still we were surprised why the batch job was always rejected at the Customer’s end.

We investigated and we realized a couple of issues.  Firstly, the data from the Customer.  It seems that in few records in the affected batch run have data errors and hence when a batch of records is sent to the Customer and if there is an error, it is not able to acknowledge the ACK and reject the batch.  This means that if 3 out of the 10 records have data errors, the remaining 7 ‘clean’ records are still being rejected!!

Secondly there is an issue with the validation rule from the Customer’ end.  As of today, except for the 2 major elements that have data validation’s check we are not able to know what are the other validation rule applies for each of the element of a web service call.  This may also cause the above-mentioned issue whereby user may not know if the incident is due to wrong data and result the ‘looping’ to occur and might crash the system.  It has been found out that for the new set of error, the transaction status “B” was somehow rejected by the system.  As such, the team has ‘manually’ amended the affected records’ transaction status to “A” (the accepted status) in order for the rest of the webservice calls to be activated and our system is able to grab more records.