Collaboration in a Command and Control World

In my last post, Managing IT Services Contractors, we looked at the experiences of a project manager trying to corral two IT Services contractors as part of a major infrastructure upgrade and the steps he could have taken to improve the overall project experience.

In this post, we’ll look at one project manager’s experience trying to guide a technology upgrade offering a multitude of opportunities to enhance maintainability, performance and usability in an environment where the sponsor focused exclusively on time and costs. Thanks to reader S.R. for the details on this case.

The Situation

In 2000, this medium sized, mid-west based manufacturing concern launched an in-house development effort to automate and enhance a core administrative function that had been a mish-mash of older technologies and manual processes that were costly, error prone and time consuming. The new application, developed in Visual Basic version 6 (VB6) back then, leveraged the in house development group’s experiences with earlier versions of the language and delivered the expected improvements in quality and performance.

Unfortunately, in 2008, Microsoft ended support for VB6 and replaced it with its .NET offering. The VP Administration at the firm was aware of the impending loss of support but declined to take any action until just before vendor support for the product ended. He then challenged the CIO to find a way out of the dilemma as quickly as possible and at the lowest cost possible.

The Goal

The VP Administration, the sponsor of the undertaking, established the following objectives for the project:

  • Deliver a supported solution in six months or less
  • The costs should not exceed $250,000
  • There should be no changes to the business user experience. They should be able to operate exactly as before.

The Project

The CIO, with the sponsor’s agreement, appointed an experienced internal project manager to lead the effort. She identified and met with the other stakeholders who needed to be involved. Collectively they met with the sponsor to review his expectations and discuss some of the needs and opportunities the other stakeholders had in mind.