Plan for Success and Plan for Failure
Contrary to popular belief, implementation planning is not merely installing a system one day and letting end users at the new system the next. Rather, implementation planning starts as soon as the project starts and actual implementation activities begin well before the system is ready to deploy. Too often, managers overlook the need to plan for the day the new systems or processes are ready to hand over to production. End user training, support planning, data migration planning, and fallback planning are just a few of the key areas that project managers must document to ensure a successful deployment.
Prepare the users. The most important item a project manager cannot forget to do is to prepare the end users for the change in systems or processes. An untrained, unprepared user base will lead to certain project failure. User training and user acceptance testing are two very important activities that help mitigate this risk. User training includes overviews of the new system and allows the user practice using the new systems or applying the new processes that are being introduced. User acceptance testing allows the user to run the system through a typical operational day. This activity has a two-fold benefit: the users become familiar with the system before it is in production, and users can sometimes find issues that were not discovered by the project testing team.
Prepare support teams. As the end users must be trained, so must the teams that support them on a day-to-day operational basis. Forgetting to train the support/help-desk teams will almost certainly jeopardize the successful acceptance of the new systems or processes. These teams must be taught not only how to support the end users on the new systems, but also the technical aspects of the systems being put in place.
Prepare the data. If the project is developing a new system versus replacing an existing system, one may think there is no need to worry about data. This fallacy will most definitely affect the perception of the quality of a project. It is just as important to plan how to get data into the new system, as it is to plan how to migrate the data from one system to another. In some projects, the data migration or insertion process begins as soon as the databases are ready. In other projects, migration happens after the system is determined to be stable, but before transition to production occurs.
Prepare for failure. No one likes to think of his or her project failing, but in reality, this happens more often than we like to admit. There must be an adequate back out, fallback, or no-go plan in place just in case it is determined that the system is not ready for production. These plans can be as simple as “continue with the current system and fix outstanding issues” to as complex as parallel processing for a certain period of time. The stakeholders play an important role here, as it is up to them to determine the best method for their organization. This is really just risk management, with the risk being “system is not ready for production on scheduled implementation date” and adequate risk planning is crucial.
Proper and adequate implementation planning will go a long way to ensure satisfaction of the results of the project. End users are more comfortable with the system once it is online, support teams can provide better support of the end users, and all data needed for operational activity has been migrated. Combined together, these activities assure a smooth transition of the systems or processes to production.
Further reading
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Right Projects Done Right: From Business Strategy to Successful Project Implementation (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series) |
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Project Delivery in Business-As-Usual Organizations |
© 2009, Juanita Woods, PgMP, PMP, MBA. All rights reserved.
