How "Stick to Basics" did the turn around

How "Stick to Basics" did the turn around

This is the experience when I took over a portfolio of Development Projects. The portfolio was handed over to me with Profitability of - 7 % and the Customer Satisfaction of  15% (Percentage of Customers who recommend the Organization for other customers).m It was quite challenging when I met each of the Customers for the Projects of the Portfolio. There were as many as 8 Serious escalations and one Customer reached their procurement office to look for alternative vendor. My meeting went with full of grievances and concerns and I spent the first day to note down all the grievances without giving any response. On end of the day, I collated the inputs and arrived at a conclusion that all issues were boiling down to 6 major areas. Second day the trend continued but I was getting closer to the resolution path. Once my meetings were done I met the manager of all the Customers and requested him for breathing time of a month. He asked what is the kind of master plan that I had to resolve the issues that were continuing for more than a year. 

I explained him the top 3 reasons as Poor requirement gathering, Poor internal quality assurance and the Project Management. Even though all three functions were happening from my teams it needed some direction and regrouping in the way it was required. 

I made the testing and Solutioning as independent functions and isolated from the Project team. This means, Testing team does the testing fully with focus of identifying as many bugs as possible, to cover as many scenarios as possible, to test for breaking the system and allow for fixing and making a robust system. Without the testing team's consent the Components will not be given to the Customer for final testing. And all the internal testing, defects and resolution reports will be shared with the Customer on regular basis. The test leads were given direct connect with the Customers to operate independently instead of routing through the Project manager in the earlier model.

The Solutions team will be again working as independent units. they will do the requirement gathering, design/ validate the designs and test scripts and also oversee the deployment. The team ensures the coding is done with compliance to standards, covering security, performance, Look and feel aspects apart from meeting the required functionality. 

Project Management was taken over by me as I didnt want to take any chance. But I also setup an internal training through workshops for improving the Project Management skills. In the projects I was overseeing, I broke the entire phase in to daily activities and tracked at that levels. It was more like executing through Check list. No great science like Agile model or any sort of it, but I followed a simple principle of breaking the entire activities in to tasks of not more than a day duration with each task mapped to the resource. I filtered the tasks by dates and tracked on what is going well and what is not.  It took a week for me to make the plan and it went on it's own from than on-wards. 

Customer confidence was gained from the point when we made our work transperant to convince the customer that the team is working with dedication. the daily test reports, updates on any design changes even if they are very small, any alerts on the dates even if delayed by 1 day were a few items that provided the comfort to the Customer.

At the end, we got lot of accolades and we did 26 releases all either on time or ahead of schedule with no significant defects on Live or Post live of the deployment.

We also didn't lose any profitability in this process as the Project was not overrun. 

The major conclusion is that we didnt try to innovate any new methods, Processes or Best Practices and all we did is "Stick to Basics". Many times this is what works and we miss and look for innovations.

The below is the summary of challenges we faced and how we addressed them along with final outcomes.

Challenges

• Poor Product Quality (Large Defects)
• Requirement understanding and conflicts
• Project Overruns
• Project Management
• Attrition of Key people and failure to manage the impact
• Last minute Surprises

How we addressed in Planning & Design phase

• Progressive elaboration and Validation of Scope and Time Lines: Pre-planning exercise to finalize the project plan based on completion of requirement analysis & approval
• Pre-planning exercise culminates with delivery of agreed project execution plan.
• Design reviewed and approved by Independent Architects before presenting to Customer’s Technology Board  for Review 

How we addressed in  Execution Phase

• Daily Connect with Customer (S)
• Dedicated and Independent Testing team to certify the Deliverables before offering for User acceptance
• Full cycle of regression testing for any release (Major/Minor/Hotfix)
•  AS IS – TO BE documentation for any code changes to avoid redundancy
• TO BE code change review by  Tech lead & Architect before implementing
•  All DB changes reviewed by independent DBA before adding into code
• Daily Stand in Meeting
• Cross-skilled team, Documentation and SOPs  to offer flexibility and  address attrition

What we Achieved

• •Delivered 26 Releases either on time or ahead of schedule
• •Negligible defects identified in User Acceptance Tests
• •No impact of attrition to the Delivery due to the robust succession management
• •No Post production issues identified
• •Customer delight improved to 90%
• •Still achieved the Profitability of >20%