One of the pain-in-the-butt realities about going on holiday is the coming back part. It seems you spend all your time right before vacation getting projects in a state where they can fly on auto-pilot for however long you're gonna be away. But, when you get back, you find out that the winds had changed somewhere on day two of your absence.
That was me on January 6. I got back from a relaxing Caribbean cruise only to find my carefully constructed flight plan had been slowly drifting off course for the prior two weeks.
It's not really as bad as all that; I'm just getting melodramatic in my age. I'll save you the inglorious details of all my frustrations. Suffice to say there's one project foremost on my mind: the "Longhorn" project. I had just got done with a phone meeting a couple of hours ago where I expressed my frustrations with the client engagement manager about how the project was being managed. Just prior to the call, I was preparing a recommendation to cut our losses and can them alltogether.
Project Longhorn
Longhorn is basically an internal label, in Microsoft fashion, for a pet project of mine at a company I'm affiliated with. It's basically a platform upgrade -- a critically needed one -- to an old subscription-based static web site with little/no interactivity. The goal of the project is to bring the site from the 90s to the 21st century; leveraging social media/sharing features along the way while upgrading all content on the old site to bring more value to subscribers. There are other key business objectives (KBOs, as they say) but I gave you the gist.
What makes it a pet project? It's a great product, if a little tired. In fact, evidence of its weariness has manifested in the form of declining subscriber counts. But since it's also a workhorse for the company's coffer, much is riding on an upgrade that will have compelling value for its existing subscribers--and new subscribers.
All things are possible... with sufficient time and resources...
...Neither of which this small company has much of. The main barrier: the original cost of all the desired upgrades was prohibitive for this small company. But, doing nothing wasn't an option either.
Harkening back to my days as an organizational management consultant, I had to do some of that change navigation stuff to overcome organizational resistance to the risk of change. (Managers weren't really afraid of change itself. It was the risks they feared. They needed some structured way to mitigate them.)
The long and short of it is that this upgrade was over a year in the making. and I was seriously thinking of bagging it.
To mitigate risk, I spent a lot of hours in a campaign to define and document requirements, develop an RFP, solicit proposals, devise a rating system for vendor selection and then make a case for funding and project setup... all leading to (the hope is) implementation and rollout a couple of months from now.
I'm tellin' ya, the whole RFP thing was a stretch from the norm for this company, let alone the ultimate selection of an offshore service provider. Say what you want. The fact is, off-shoring is a global business reality. And one which all the large companies I've had the pleasure of working for in the past had successfully pulled-off for well over a decade. In my opinion, off-shoring is a Fortune 2000 page book many small businesses would do well to leverage. But they don't, for fear of the implied risks.
And they're right to entertain those fears. Those risks are real. I'll talk more about them in future posts on this series.
The Longhorn project diaries will be a continuing series. I'll share more about recent frustrations with this project and how I came close to a decision today to recommend bagging our offshore service provider alltogether.
For now, we're back on, but not without first having insisted on some changes to how the project was being managed.
Will this project ultimately succeed? Nothing's guaranteed. I certainly hope so. A lot's riding on it. And that's without saying anything about the reputation of offshore service providers, in general. Though I've had very positive experiences with offshore providers in the past, the old addage still rings true: "Past performance is no guarantee of future success."
Either way the winds blow, I'll write about how the project progresses. Hopefully you'll be able to learn something from my, uh, mistakes. (?) (Hopefully I'll be writing more about successes.) And, in time, I'll name names. For now, I'll keep the field level and keep the name of the service provider out of the posts. It's the process and experiences I want to focus on.
Stay tuned.
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