As CRP1 turned into CRP2, and summer turned into fall, the implementation team found itself in the thickest, most difficult part of the implementation. Project scope had expanded to include major modifications, and a new after sales support package. One other major scope change also loomed. Because the downstream impacts of the project were much greater than expected, the team decided to tackle some larger technical issues. Whereas before systems had tended to communicate directly with one another (i.e., “point to point”), a new approach would now be employed in which all data communication would take place via a “data warehouse.” Utilization of a data warehouse would allow all of Cisco’s applications to access a single source for their information needs.
The scope changes meant further shifts in the utilization of Cisco’s resources, especially for the company’s 100-person IT department. The technical nature of most of the scope changes meant that this group bore most of the responsibility for the project additions. Solvik described the result:
Basically all the rest of the IT group started decommitting from their other projects. They said “we have to spend our time just absorbing the fact that the core systems in the company are changing. We are needing to divert more and more energy, and more and more resources towards the project.” IT did nothing else that year. We also decided not to convert any history as part of this project. Instead the data warehouse group created the capability to report historical and future in an integrated data conversion. We renumbered our customers; we renumbered our products; and we changed our bill-of-materials structure. We changed fundamentally all of our underlying data in the company and the data warehouse became the bridging system that would span history and future together.
By the end of CRP2, the first round of modifications was in place and running. During this time the implementation team continued to deepen its understanding of the Oracle and Service packages and to determine how to best make them work for Cisco. The final goal of CRP2 was to begin testing the system, both hardware and software, to see how well it would stand up to the processing load and transaction volumes required to run Cisco’s growing business.
CRP3’s focus was on testing the full system and assessing the company’s readiness to “go live.” A final test was conducted with a full complement of users to see how the system would perform, front to back, with a full transaction load. The implementation team executed these tests by capturing a full day’s worth of actual business data and “rerunning” it on a Saturday in January. Team members watched as each track, in turn, executed a simulated day’s worth of work. With this test completed to the entire team’s satisfaction, everyone felt ready for cut-over in February. Pond described the ceremony that concluded CRP3:
At the end of CRP3 each one of the functional leads presented their piece of the process and said “yes or no” on whether they were ready to go. We did each of them separately and then put everyone in the same room and made them nod their heads and say “we should go.” . . . And then we turned the damn thing on. . . .