Interview Story - Accomplishment

One of the first projects as a newly hired Senior Project Manager at Regional Insurance was to help their Life Insurance company migrate off their mainframe system to a new, digital platform. This migration would save the company an estimated $2 million per year in equipment and IT support costs. More importantly, it would avoid a potentially catastrophic loss of their data.

When I started, this project was a quagmire. The program was 3 years old, they’d spent $20 million, four times their original budget, and there was no end in sight.

This was one of the messiest projects I had ever undertaken. Yet, I felt that if I could get everyone clear on our objectives and collaborating towards those objects, we could get this project finished.

It quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to be easy.

The Life insurance company had started down this path without IT’s involvement. IT was uncooperative due to concerns about job losses with the removal of the mainframes. Management was forced to “go rogue”. Instead, they relied on consulting labor and very little help from IT.

To make matters worse, the consultant managing the program wasn’t allowed to speak with anyone in IT without the business owner present; he also wasn’t allowed to talk to the consultants who worked for other companies – everything had to go through the business owner.

I spent a few weeks interviewing several team members. I wanted to get a better understanding of the project and of the people involved. From these conversations, I saw specific opportunities to get everyone focused and invested.

First, I created a RACI Chart for all the team roles. This chart clarifies what specific team members are expected to do for each project component: who was responsible, who was accountable, who needed to be consulted, and who needed to be informed. I reviewed this with the business owner – he’d never seen anything like it, but he loved it. With this chart, he felt more comfortable relinquishing his personal involvement and allowing the specific team members to work more directly together.

The second thing I did was set up a 3-day, mandatory planning session; everyone on the team was required to attend, business and IT. They needed to see themselves as a team.

On the first day, we reviewed the RACI chart, talked thru some of program challenges, and answered questions for those brave enough to speak up – this took up the entire day, but it was productive.

At the beginning of the second day, I asked each person individually, in front of everyone else, if they were willing to commit to the program. Everyone agreed. And I reminded them the worst thing they could do was publicly commit to the team but then be negative after they left the room; they needed to succeed or fail as a team. Heads nodded, and the message sunk in.

For the remaining two days, we reviewed every line item in the existing plan. If anything was missing, and we found a lot, we added it and estimated the duration. When we finished, we had a rough idea of when we could potentially go live – it was a year later in June of 2018. The last thing I did was ask all of the technical team members to start meeting weekly to continue reviewing the plan, discussing progress, reporting status, and making adjustments – the business wasn’t invited, but they came anyway. Initially, my role was to facilitate these meetings, but after the first couple of weeks they hardly needed me.

This created an environment where they were forced to communicate. At my urging, the updates were also presented by the Program Manager to the key business stakeholders and executive management in the monthly Steering Committee meetings. That really helped to empower him. And slowly, but surely, the team started to make some traction. It was fun to watch them come together. With every passing week, the plan and scope of work was refined, and by the beginning of October, they felt like an END OF YEAR go-live was possible. They’d cut 6 months off the plan!

So I saw an opportunity and challenged them if they had the system in production by January 1st, I’d cook some Texas-style brisket for everyone on the team.

In the end, the system went live at the end of the year, the business was happy, and the brisket turned out awesome. But more importantly, this was really great for team morale because they needed that “win”. And it also began to set the stage for restoring trust in IT. Over the course of the following year, we released 90% of the consultants on that program and supported the remaining phases using internal talent.