What I Did To Overcome The Most Exhaustive IT Project In My Life
The story was shared by Carrie Leder Nunemaker, a project manager at Arkansas Supreme Court, who has more than 8 years of experiences as an IT project manager. (Visit Carrie’s LinkedIn here).
The most exhaustive project of my career is also my favorite project to date.
As a project manager for a technology company providing telecommunications hardware and software, network infrastructure, and support services to large multi-site customers, fire drills are the norm.
This particular customer was a large national rental car organization with thousands of locations across the United States.
They had converted approximately 635 of their locations to a hosted VOIP telecom system that had left their entire operation without service for days on end after one particularly long service interruption.
There was a sudden need to immediately remove the existing solution and replace it with an Avaya IPO that met 99.999% reliability.
With a month to prepare for the project, we quickly identified challenges.
- The client wanted to roll out all 635 locations, including ordering new POTs lines, within three months.
- The locations stretched across the US, but had a heavy presence in the Eastern part of the country.
- This project ran January through March, 2012, when record breaking winter months brought us blizzard-like conditions in many of the Eastern and Midwestern states.
Our second challenge was:
- The constraint of using three large LECs for POTs line orders.
- Two of the three LECs had delivery success rates of less than 10% which introduced additional risk.
- To further complicate matters, rental car facilities are extremely busy on Mondays and Fridays and the client indicated installers could not be in the facilities on those days.
So, 635 locations, approximately 40 business days, inclement weather, and vendors with a poor delivery record. What could go wrong?
With a project of this size moving at break-neck speed it was imperative that the project team was organized and communication processes were followed without fail.
What we did
We used our month of lead time to develop the processes and tools that we knew could make or break the project.
Checklists and install manuals were critical to our success.
Because we were installing a large number of locations with a new installer in every region, it was important to the client that each of the installers completed the installation in the same way.
- It was essential that we received the required deliverables from each installer and could track those deliverables to a particular install location.
- Checklists for project team members and detailed installer’s manuals outlining the installation processes made this requirement possible.
- Daily status meetings were another tool we used to ensure the team was communicating and that everyone knew the status of project objectives.
- Weekly status meetings with our client stakeholders ensured timely updates and open issues could be addressed quickly.
To maintain all of the data required for these installs, we created a SQL database that allowed us to add information related to deliverables, maintain POTs line information, and document installation schedules. This was an invaluable resource for us during the project.
The combination of these tools and strong project leadership combined to result in a successful implementation project.
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