8.6. The implementation team
The implementation team was selected from all functional disciplines. At the primary site, twelve of the most capable and knowledgeable people were selected. The expectation was for an average commitment of 50% of the team’s time for the six month anticipated duration of the project. Although the total time estimate was very accurate (actual logged time for the team was 6000 man hours) the distribution of time required varied greatly. For some team members, a full-time commitment was added to their continuing daily duties and responsibilities. A better approach would have been to assign six multi-discipline individuals committed full time to the project. Additional expertise could have been attained as needed through interviews and temporary assignments to the project team. Totally free of day today interruptions, a smaller team would likely have been more productive. A major responsibility of the project team was the conference room pilot. A cross-section of products, processes, customers, and various scenarios were created and tested. Several new processes were evaluated and accepted or rejected. One particularly rigorous test was a series of complete order-to-cash process flows, where the transaction values were manually calculated in advance and the system results validated for accuracy and completeness. The conference room pilot was one place where the pressures of team member’s daily responsibilities adversely impacted the quality of the project. In those functional areas that were represented by project team members that had sufficient time available to explore alternate process strategies during the conference room pilot, significant improvements were generated. But in those functional areas represented by team members that had inadequate time to dedicate to the pilot, the typical result was a substandard replication of the old legacy system processes.