family and work, it can work :)

Source

I was talking the other day with a former colleque about a project we had worked on for some years ago. Great memories and of of the most successful projects I managed I guess.

I was contracted at a Healthcare/educational organization to do some projects. At the time I entered the organization it wasn’t sure yet which projects(s) I would get but they hired about 10 project managers at the same time. That already made me wonder if the organization had any experience doing projects because I thought it was a bit strange to hire so many project managers and not really knowing which projects you gave to whom. Normally the process would be that you hire a project manager for a certain project of which the manager has some experience with :)

The first weeks were odd, all the newly hired project manager were sitting in the same office doing about nothing because they (we) didn’t had any project yet. I am not the kind of person to sit and wait until somebody asks me to pick up something so I decided to have a chat with the program manager and the client. They were both great guys which I could get along with fine so I just told them my opinion about how things went.

I said “guys, in this way you are burning a lot of money without any view on a result whatsoever, the hired managers are getting bored and doing other stuff as they supposed to do, I want a project to start with please…”

I think they liked me being pro-active like that and I was asked which projects I had most interest in. They had a lot of projects defined of which some of them I really doubt if the purpose and the goals was clear but well…

Source

I had a lot of experience at that time with upgrades of (client) operating systems in projects. I had done several already at other clients and my interest at first went to their project “Upgrading from Windows XP to Windos 7” but there were also some others that had my attention :) But eventually I went for the upgrade project.

When they agreed me having doing that project I started with (of course) gathering information for my project plan. I noticed that the organization had a very low maturity level, nothing was really organized, the system administrators department wasn’t structured in any way and there were a lot of other things that surprised me a lot.

First of all I tried to scope the project: What were their expectations ?
With that question alone I already confused the project board. Like in many organizations there are different stakeholders and they all have their own agenda. But one thing was very clear for me, the reputation of the internal IT department was really bad. There were little users that had any faith in the capabilities of the IT staff. So the main requirement I got was that the upgrade had to be of a high quality with the least of impact for end users and locations. Right before the start of my project they ran an internal project for an Office upgrade. I don’t know what that project manager was thinking but she made all users travel to a certain location to turn in their laptop to get the office upgrade. For some users that meant traveling for more than two hours. My philosophy is that you can’t take users out of their work for those kind of things, that won’t work for goodwill and understanding. Besides that I really was amazed by the decision they made to not combine the office and operating system upgrade together, that way you only disturb the user organization once..

So with that requirement in mind I wrote the rest of my project plan. I decided that it would be for the best if we visited all the locations and users with a team of upgrade specialist to upgrade on site without any trouble for the ‘residents’. During my inventory I discovered some points for attention which could have an impact on the whole project

• The application portfolio consisted out of more than 600 applications with a lot of overlay. A lot of applications were bought by the location themselves and therefore had similar functionality then some applications on other locations.
• A lot of hardware was end of life so we had to do a compatibility check on them to see if they were compatible with Windows 7 ( which a lot weren’t). A project to replace all the end of life hardware was already started but was on hold because the IT manager had big problems with the logistic part of it.
• The network bandwidth on some locations was terrible. They had a connection which was meant for small homes on which they had a complete office running, so the performance was terrible.

Source

When I was writing down the requirements for the project I made an investment plan. The starting point was to arrange a team which would visit all locations to service the users with a in place upgrade without any interference of delay. So to fulfill the quality requirement. I had made a high level planning and resource demand for the team.

When I presented my plan for the project board they were shocked about the initial investment. They never have had a project which was planned and calculated in a realistic way so they weren’t used to those figures which made me realize I had to bring it in a different way. So I agreed to revise a bit of my project plan and would present it again the next week, so I did.

It decided to use the points of attention as a benefit to the project and the plan. So I entered these things into to the plan:

• The hardware replacement would be added to the project, while we visit all the locations why not replace the needed hardware while we were there. That way the other project and the budget could be added to mine ;)
• While we had to test all applications for compatibility on Windows 7 I decided that it would be of importance to consolidate applications with same functionality to one or two variations instead of multiple. With that the application footprint would shrink big time and the maintenance costs will be a lot less.
• Because of the shock it brought to management as far as the costs of the total project I divided the total investment through the total amount of users. That’s a commercial trick, the total stays the same but the presence seems acceptable ;)

Source

So when I presented the plan for the board they were much more enthusiastic so the agreed me starting the project.

So now I had to bring into practice what I had written down ;) first of all I started to call some people from out my network which I worked with before. I had to gather a team which I could count on in every situation, my power lies within combining a team which will go through almost anything for each other, so that I can count on them in hard and stressful times. I managed to get four guys in my team from out of my own network but still needed about 6 to 8 for the team to complete. So I called some recruiters I worked with in the past to tell them my needs. I had some interviews, made some choices and the team was complete.

One of my closest friends is a IT architect and I asked him to make the design for the new workstation image, the other three friends joined the upgrade team of which one of them took care of the coordination. When the project was running and the team was complete we made plans to visit all locations to get a point of contact which we made responsible for the local communication and planning. We made an overall detail planning and made appointments with the locations when the would be upgraded.

During that time we contracted an external supplier to re-package the application packages. Unfortunate the technology was based on application virtualization by Novell Zenworks. The IT architect had some good friends at a Novell vendor. It was absolutely no commodity so the supplier we contracted was quiet expensive. Though I managed to get a fixed price per package (I knew that there were some difficult applications).

One of the hardest tasks was to find application owners, the ones who were responsible for key-users or as decision makers. For me that was really important because the organization has to know they are responsible for choices and selections. Eventually I made the business owners application owner because no one within the organization came through.

When the image and applications where ready we ran a pilot on the main location with success. The deployment went great, the applications worked but most important the users where happy about the way things went, the result (a new and quicker workstation) the way we approached them, the whole package.

I was quiet happy with my team except for one engineer. In my opinion he didn’t worked to the best of his abilities and wasn’t honest about his hours of working. I have given him several options to improve but he didn’t, so I had to say goodbye to him. I didn’t felt like going to all the job interviews again, especially not because we had a planning to realize. Then this idea came to my mind for my youngest brother. He was a chef in a facility for alder people but the facility went bankrupt. So he was already unemployed for almost 1,5 year. I know he had a lot of feeling for IT but didn’t had any experience. I called him to ask if he would like to work in my team. I told him what the work was like and that I knew for sure he could do the job. (he is a very insecure person). He was enthusiast about it and told me he would love to participate in the team. So with that in mind I went to my client and explained him the situation, I said to him that I would be totally responsible for his work and actions but that I have all the trust in the world he would do a fine job. My client told me that he trusted me and that all he cared about was the result and the quality.

My brother joined the team, a bit insecure in the beginning but after a while he was totally in place. He fitted awesome in the team. The project progress went on schedule, we achieved the project result in time and budget, so we had a successful project which made the organization happy but also the team.

Source

As a bonus for the result I arranged an evening in an entertainment center in Almelo which were we stayed overnight so everyone (if desired) could have a drink.

When the project was finished I had to dismiss the team members , I started a new project within the same organization. The project was a implementation of Microsoft Sharepoint as a substitute for their intra- and internet. When making plans for that project I heard the Servicedesk complaining about their resources. They had to little employers for the service desk. So the manager mentioned that he would publish a vacancy for a service desk employer. When I heard that I told him that I just send a complete team home with a lot of knowledge about the environment and with a service oriented mindset. I advised him to get one of those people instead so he didn’t have to train someone new, and if I was allowed to give a preference that he should hire my brother :)… So great was the surprise for my brother when he got a phonecall with the question if he wanted to work at the organization again. Of course he accepted the offer.

So I stayed there for about two years more eventually being the manager of the infrastructure team. When it was time for me to go to the next challenge my brother stayed with them and he still is. He has left the servicedesk and is trained to be a Microsoft System Administrator now. I am very proud of him for his determination, from a chef to of IT Administrator !!!

We do miss our moments at work together, we drove together every day…We loved every minute about it. Who knows, maybe we work together again in the future….

have a great day !!!

Peter

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