Question

1. Who do you think are top 3 stakeholder groups
2. Now that you are familiar with the project, what are some areas that are more likely to change?
3. What are ways to monitor the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement?

CASE STUDY

VIII. Integration Management About Global Information Store

Introduction

In the relaunch of the ERP system, now with Ms. Adriana Holmes as the new CPO, the project team reexamined and refreshed the business case. After a detailed analysis, the team agreed to apply a program management approach to manage the overall ERP implementation. Within the ERP program, however, there were a number of important specific projects to consider including the sequencing of them. After much deliberation, it was recognized that one of the previous biggest challenges was the inconsistency in the data design from the earlier attempt that led to so much confusion. Even though the actual ERP application is still under investigation, everyone eventually agreed that the company needed to launch a project to build a master data management system (MDM) that can establish and enforce clarity of important data elements across its customers, products, and people. The GIS project was launched in December 2012 to build the MDM system.

The first phase of the GIS system includes the three most important types of data: People, Products, and Customers. The GIS People brings clarity to how the organization and its systems view and manage its employees and contractors. This role-based system will eventually be used by other systems, including the ERP, for authentication and access control. Plus, in a future phase of the ERP, this GIS People will be an invaluable input to the HR system. The GIS Products formalizes the product and services categories of the 20 million (and growing) SKUs throughout the organization. By standardizing the product and service categories, the organization can assign proper product management processes including service delivery. GIS Customers is required for the ERP system to better manage the supply chain. It also has a strategic importance for another project under consideration – customer relationship management (CRM) in which the GIS Customers will be an important foundational component. There are additional GIS components being planned for future phases. This includes WWE retail store, distribution center, and vendors and suppliers.After much deliberation, the project team agreed with these strategic business drivers for the GIS system:

Single source of truth. GIS system will be the system of record for the information in its system.

Reduce redundant data. GIS system will be the only system for these records, to avoid confusion.

Single point of accountability. Once done, the GIS system will have one global team to manage the system and govern the processes for data identification, categorization, cleansing, use, and termination.

Continuous improvement. This team will be responsible for the ongoing management of this application and its data as a strategic asset of the organization.

Phase 1 of the GIS System is estimated to be $10 million and requiring about 1.5 years to complete, after the sign-off of the project charter. Given the importance of the project, Ms. Holmes will be the project sponsor, and she will also be forming a Governance Committee in which Mr. Zhang will also be participating. The ongoing operating budget for maintaining and improving the system is estimated at $2 million per year. Both the budget and schedule are approximations, and refinements are expected. However, given the history, the need to produce a quality system is the highest priority. Mr. Zhang has also suggested that WWE should use this project as a way to develop its employees. One of the noticeable failures of the previous attempt with the ERP implementation was treating the project as an information technology project. As such, the previous project team, including Mr. Zhang, was viewing the project through the lens of technology challenges – how to make the systems talk to each other. But ultimately, the failure was not so much that the systems did not “talk” with each other, it was that the systems were “talking over” each other. Furthermore, there were significant employee issues – not knowing why the system behaves the way it did or why some tasks that were very simple in the legacy system now take three times longer to perform. Apparently, there was also poor alignment between the system and the business processes, and in the second week after the launch, there were 2,500 incident tickets generated. The project and the operational teams were so overwhelmed, as they were designed to handle just 100 tickets per day. Thus, many incidents “fell through the cracks” and the resulting problems impacted customer service and delivery. Learning from past lessons, Ms. Holmes has insisted on better integration management. Working with the project manager for the GIS System, the team agreed to implement the following processes:

1. Integrated change management. All changes will be deliberately managed after their approval

2. Dependency management. Project manager is responsible for overseeing the dependencies across multiple teams within the project.

3. Reports. Detailed project performance reports will be shared across the entire project team. All team leads and above are required to read them.

4. Meetings and communication. Project meetings and broader communication are planned in advance with mandatory attendance of every manager and above, of impacted departments.

Ms. Holmes and the project manager believe that through these activities conducted regularly throughout the project, the GIS project will be able to achieve a strong degree of integration across the various project teams within the overall project.

IX. Stakeholder Management

With the project charter approved by February 2013, the GIS System is moving into the Preparation Phase. You as the project manager just had a lengthy meeting with Ms. Holmes and Ben Alvarez, the newly hired head of the project management office (PMO) and discussed some of the biggest failures from the earlier attempt on the ERP system. These include the following:

◾ WWE executives failed to understand the difficulty of ERP implementation. Starting with Mr. Zhang, the entire management team failed to understand the complexities and challenges of the ERP implementation. This was partly because there was no prior experience of ERP implementation and partly because the ERP vendor painted a rosy picture. Nonetheless, the management team criticized itself heavily for the lack of executive attention.

◾ ERP vendor was poorly managed. The internal project manager accepted the performance reports without much questioning. In preparation for the lawsuit, it was discovered that much of the performance reporting was based on overly optimistic interpretation of progress, with borderline deception.

◾ Project stakeholders were not engaged. In a hurry to launch the project and believing that the business case was obvious, the project team started doing work without understanding the impact to all parties – internal employees; suppliers and vendors; customers both retail and institutional; and various shareholders. This led to poor expectation management, and once problems started, there were significant numbers of conflicts.

◾ There were many other challenges, but the above three were the most relevant to your next assignment. In hindsight, what saved the company from even a bigger fiasco was fortuitous. In preparation for a town hall meeting in May 2010 (about 2 months after the launch), Mr. Zhang pushed the project manager and the ERP vendor for specific capabilities and readiness of their systems, and the answers received were ambiguous. They promised better order management, for example, but were not able to explain what “better” meant. On training for the new system, the ERP vendor presented a credible plan but also missed some important business process considerations, which meant that the operator would know how to use the system but not understand “why”. In short, Mr. Zhang felt so uncomfortable with the meeting that he went back to his management team and raised serious alarms. By then, it was too late to fix much of the concerns, and the management team agreed to invest $500k per month extra to keep the legacy system in operation for as long as needed until the new ERP system proved its working capabilities. Mr. Zhang further insisted that the legacy and the new system reconcile its differences every night until the differences become negligible. (Sadly, the differences were almost random, leading Mr. Zhang to shut down the new system in March 2011.) As one of the first steps in project planning, Ms. Holmes, Mr. Alvarez, and you agree that conducting a stakeholder analysis is incredibly important.

Answer 1

1. The top 3 stakeholder groups are as follows:

· The management at GIS

· The project team of GIS

· WWE executives and management

2. The areas which are more likely to change, are as follows:

· The data management system of the company will get transformed to enhance overall data protection and effectiveness

· The HR system will get integrated with GIS and people analytics and big data will support the manpower decisions taken by the company

· The components of the supply chain will become easily traceable with the help of ERP and GIS integration

3. The different ways in which the stakeholder engagement can be monitored effectively, are as follows:

· Different engagement questionnaires can be developed for the different stakeholder groups, which can be floated and analyzed to understand the rate of stakeholder engagement

· A platform can be integrated in the central MIS of the company where the stakeholders can give direct feedback

· A stakeholder engagement assessment matrix can be plotted so as to continuously monitor the rate of stakeholder engagement in business