Case Study: Implementing a Project Management Office to Drive High Quality, Consistent Global Program Execution

Transcription

1 Case Study: Implementing a Project Management Office to Drive High Quality, Consistent Global Program Execution Introduction A Fortune 100 software company utilized electronic software distribution (ESD) to deliver software to consumers within their e-commerce web properties. Operational oversight of the sites, including policies, program execution and quality assurance resided within the Online Operations team. In order to effectively market and sell the company s products (both physical and digital), the client had designed an in-house ecommerce web store. Considerable sales targets had been set and achieved and the business was expanding rapidly. Additionally, the client had plans to implement a number of new features and capabilities to drive strong customer experiences with the site.

2 The challenge was that the infrastructure on which the business operated couldn t scale to meet sales and traffic targets. The site relied on many manual processes to handle product assortment, merchandising and site maintenance. After careful consideration, the client chose to migrate the business to a third party provider with significant e-commerce delivery capabilities. However, transferring a >$100m annual business to a whole new infrastructure is no small task and therefore required a variety of skills and specialization. With the holiday sales season approaching, the Online Operations group was tasked with setting up and implementing a Project Management Office (PMO) to ensure on time site migration. One of the most critical aspects of this project was the timing. Similar to most online retailers, the client earns over 50% of the overall annual sales during the holiday shopping season. It was therefore crucial to deliver a high quality program on time to avoid any risk to holiday sales. Due to the substantial scope of this project, more than 12 workstreams were set up to implement seamless migration using the clients available resources, the thirty party s e-commerce infrastructure and multiple vendor resources. Project Workstreams: Project management Business planning Marketing Customer account management Store front end development Product data & on-boarding Bit hosting and delivery Sales call centers Physical distribution Finance Customer support Reporting/BI PMO

3 The Challenge The general ownership of the program was hotly contested by the client s three distinct units: business, engineering and operations. It was therefore the role of the PMO team to ensure that all group s needs were met and that they felt they had appropriate authority and visibility The substantial scope meant that success would involve the migration of the entire business to a third party. Doing this required a substantial amount of backend system data that would make the migration possible. Furthermore, the introduction of a third party added financial complexity, and the need for the design and execution of a new business model. The twelve teams needed to work together to achieve timely completion of the project. Another challenge was the fact that the current site did not have significant customer-facing features that would be used to differentiate it and build strong customer experiences. In addition to migrating the business, which was already a colossal undertaking in its own right, the business leaders wanted to design and implement a number of new features into the site like gift cards, live chat, premium support services, mobile phones and plans and third party electronic software delivery. The timeline was very aggressive as well. The business leadership needed the whole site moved, tested and officially launched before Black Friday, leaving only a 5 month delivery window. Prior to creating the PMO, the project was moving in multiple directions at once. Each set of stakeholders was providing support mainly for the deliverables of which they were most concerned. While the leadership team concentrated on fresh capabilities and site features, the engineering team paid more attention to building new capabilities without fully considering integration challenges. At the same time, operations wanted to ensure that the required processes were developed, understood and compliant. Each organization was operating under its independent goals: business wanted sales revenue, ops needed to build clear policies and enforce them, etc. The teams lacked harmony and did not prioritize collective execution. It was very clear that the project s scope was massive and delivering it with quality before the holiday season was going to be impossible.

4 Finally, there lacked a detailed project plan to guide all these processes. This became PMO s first assignment. Analysis of Alternatives Out of the many companies that expressed interest in the project, Apex was considered the most suitable primarily due to its solid track record of establishing and implementing PMOs and executing product/program launches for the client. Furthermore, Apex had been involved with carrying out e-commerce business model analysis for the Online Operations group. The business model (Seller of Record) would be executed for the first time on this project and Apex resources assisted in the execution of the model. Recommended Solution The following work items within the project were recommended and won by Apex: Management of Business Model Implementation This included supporting the contract update process and applying effective data analysis to provide accurate information needed to support contractual positions. It was also the role of Apex to assist in contract negotiations as well as assess business model options against client needs. Support E-Commerce Store Vendor Selection and Implementation This involved implementation of new business models with the store, capture and documentation of new customer scenarios, identification of in-source vs. out-sources capabilities such as distinguishing capabilities, platforms and strategic capacities to be leveraged versus outsourced from a third party, and finally preparation and support of various presentations by the steering committee.

5 Store Migration Process Definition and Documentation The Apex team was also tasked with the store migration process definition and documentation. This included documentation of customer scenarios, support of the team process SME with relevant process definition, optimization and training in the following areas: back end financials, product set up and release, pricing, controls and compliance, order entry and processing, process workshops, JIT/E&D biz talk (vnext) and other new business scenarios and/or processes. Additionally, Apex assisted with process model optimization in light of the new business scenarios, such as mobile, gift cards, and other new program elements. PMO Support Apex also supported the PMO with issue/risk management, status reporting, change management, steering committee prep, and other related project support. Implementation As expected, understanding the tight expectations of the project scope and blending together the dozen work streams presented the first serious challenge during implementation. A workshop was conducted to identify all major project activities, dependencies and critical path. Then the PMO engaged with the work stream leads to clearly establish the most important deliverables, which were then made PMO visible deliverables, managed in cross-workstream status meetings. Secondly, the scope was far too aggressive for a holiday release. The team size was already significant and there were not options to bring on more staff. In light of a fixed release date and maxed out resource pool, the only option was to cut scope. The PMO called for and facilitated various scope-locking sessions aimed at identifying the most important deliverables against those that, even though were considered useful, could wait. In the end, the previously suggested customer experience improvements were cut from the scope because the most important deliverable was to move the system and data and achieve target site parity with the third party service provider. The third challenge was to keep all of the teams working in sync, all while working in different workstreams. To address this challenge, the PMO set up mandatory core team meetings on a

6 weekly basis to walk through critical issues and risks. For each issue/risk, the impacts were fully assessed and actions were identified and assigned to team members. The results of the core team meetings were submitted through standard status reports to a wide variety of stakeholders across client organizations. Finally, it was clear that the PMO provided consistency realized throughout the project implementation. This was achieved through PMO standardized status, close issue/risk monitoring, customer scenario documentation, formal and timely communication, project plan status reporting, project check-point presentations, among others. Results When the implementation phase was completed, consistent methodologies and fundamentals of project management had been deployed across all workstreams. A common management and easily comprehensible structure was provided. It is also worth noting that best practices in project management were utilized so that project delivery schedules were kept on pace and budget. Another significant outcome was the adoption of substantial, frequent and timely communication planning and execution that ensured that all resources synced. Finally, various risks were identified and mitigated in advance due to proper risk management schemes that were implemented.