Background

 A telephony interconnection software and services provider was having difficulty keeping up with the success of its software product.  The company is very customer focused and was enjoying “catastrophic” success winning sales for its software at major telecommunication providers in many countries.   The catastrophe was that the professional services organization responsible for the customer implementations was ill equipped to match the pace of the product sales, creating time and cost issues. The company recognized that the breadth and pace of its success was not sustainable with its current implementation methodology and infrastructure.  Rather than slow its pace of work with clients, the company decided to seek outside help to solve the problem.

XD3 Engagement

XD3 was engaged to dramatically improve the tools and performance of the professional services organization, particularly in their approach to new customer implementations.  We were asked to assess the company’s various approaches to implementation projects, to distill the best elements from each into one standardized, cost effective approach, identify and fill any missing ingredients, and to propose a process through which this one standard approach became universally adopted – all the while assuring the continued high degree of customer service for which the company had become known in the industry.

Approach

The lack of a standardized implementation methodology is, of course, a problem.  But, it provided XD3 with a trove of valuable inputs:  A number of very capable implementation leaders who –through trial and error - had many lessons learned which they could share, and the multiple implementation plans and tools which they had developed to guide the different product implementation projects.

XD3 attacked the problem on three fronts:

• One front was to perform detailed interviews with the company’s implementation practitioners to determine common issues as well as common successes across several different implementations, some of which were completed and some of which were in flight.
• Second, artifacts or deliverables from several different projects were gathered and reviewed to identify common deliverables and make recommendations regarding creation of deliverables templates that could and should be used by every implementation project.
• Third, XD3 provided external input from successful methodologies to implement COTS solutions.

 Findings

XD3 found a multitude of issues which needed to get addressed:

• Loose transition from Sales to Implementation
• Incomplete Scope Definition with neither client nor project team
• Inconsistent (and sometimes missing) implementation project plans
• Lack of Change Control
• Minimal customer acceptance of interim deliverables
• Ad Hoc Acceptance Test
• Limited ability to share/reuse collateral from multiple projects
• No cross-pollination of experience among practitioners
• No structured lessons learned process
• No use of deliverables templates, even though the same or similar deliverables were produced on the various projects
• Sharing of implementation resources across multiple projects resulting in work scheduling conflicts and difficulty in establishing task priorities
• Not fully tested software releases rushed to the client project where the bugs caused havoc on schedules and budgets

Deliverables

XD3 produced a detailed implementation project task plan comprised of dozens of major activities across six overlapping phases.  Task durations, deliverables, and milestones were incorporated into the plan template, which can be used as starting point for each implementation and easily tailored to the specific client situation.

Associated with and fully cross-referenced to the project plan was an Implementation Handbook produced by XD3 that identifies over 40 deliverables templates that each project could use.  The handbook also provided detailed explanations of each phase, activity, task and deliverable for an implementation project.

In addition, XD3 delivered a cascading process through which each new product implementation project would adopt the new standardized methodology, use its templates, and add to the inventory of implementation tools.

Benefits

XD3 provided a repeatable and highly leveraged implementation project plan that enables consistent project delivery as well as an objective basis for providing implementation and enhancement estimates to the clients – implementing the product faster and at less cost to either company or client, maintaining high customer satisfaction.