Challenge: Customer wanted an abbreviated installation of a complex Warehouse Management System but did not provide appropriate resources to accomplish preparations on their side.
Action: Documented gaps and communicated results to customer and JDA management, established a support protocol to protect the time of the JDA team members, managed update of 200 RF devices to make them compatible with new system, built trust with customer
Result:
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Challenge: Primary objective was to deploy solution to approximately 850 managers that provide technical resources to IT projects and allow all work hours to be fully accounted for. In addition, managers at all levels were to be able to see the allocation status of all resources as well as the staffing level of all projects.
Action: Applied previous experience with Clarity PPM system, data mined Active Directory to map reporting relationships and create roll-ups, coordinated deployment plan with Organizational Change Management effort to maximize adoption, led effort to build consensus across three major business units, corporate IT and the organizational transformation program known as Unity
Result:
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Challenge: The team had an operating budget composed of allocations provided by projects throughout the year. No coordinated and transparent method existed to show status or progress. Further, no validated method existed to project support needs so that largely offshore resources could be recruited in a timely manner.
Action: Conducted a survey of internal customers, group leads and executive management to determine requirements for a support system; created an integrated suite of tools that provided accountability and visibility of funds, forecasting capabilities, and reports
Result:
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Challenge: Customer "fired" independent implementor for lack of progress and asked JDA to assume lead role.
Action: Provided executable plan for completion of project, worked to establish an atmosphere of trust and cooperation, organized detailed review of requirements and designs, led by example
Result:
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Challenge: Deploy the Asset Management capability of ServiceNow across a global organization utilizing data from multiple systems with varying degrees of accuracy and detail in an environment of competing priorities
Action: Led Asset Team by example and positive influence, addressed difficult personalities while focusing team on project objectives, recognized deficiency in procedure for transfer of assets between vendors and implemented standardized inventory process to ensure accuracy and facilitate data load, drove technical team to develop solutions to issues that prevented upload of asset data into new system
Result:
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Challenge: Many of the activities of the Sourcing group were based on extremely time-consuming, manual processes
Action: Created tools that reduced the time required to determine the availability of individual or groups of resources so that they could be booked to projects, constructed a suite of reports that allowed project managers and resource managers to proactively determine the booking status of all resources.
Result:
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Challenge: Customer plan included three work streams that each had a project manager. Realities of talent acquisition within Covance caused internal and contract resources to be allocated elsewhere. This occurred in the face of a contractually mandated end date.
Action: Created detailed project plans for each work stream, identified redundant activities, created an overall plan for the entire effort, demonstrated to the Covance management that efficiency and continuity were best served by having one project manager
Result:
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Challenge: Customer purchased to lab facilities from a European pharmaceutical company. The terms of the agreement, driven by the security policies of the seller required that both sites be irrevocably changed over to the Covance network simultaneously.
Action: Drove planning and conduct of “Draw Bridge” tests at both sites that showed the readiness of critical applications for the network transition, led the planning and conduct of the physical transition of the sites to the Covance domain
Result:
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Challenge: The project scheduling tool used by the customer (Open Workbench) had some serious deficiencies in the area of reporting plans and status. Project managers were forced to rely on screen shots of the applications along with data "cut and pasted" into spreadsheets to produce reports.
Action: Took advantage of the fact that the single available output from the Open Workbench program was an XML file containing complete task information, constructed an Excel VBA program to extract the task information and populate an Access database, created a suite of reports that presented standard project management information including an Earned Value view of the project
Result:
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Challenge: The department consisted of multiple projects under the direction of a director/program manager. All reporting was performed manually and required hours of data collection and construction each week.
Action: Created a dashboard application that imported data from scheduling tool and created views of progress at the task and milestone level; also provided ability to designate primary issues and risks
Result:
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Challenge: Project consisted of deployment of Wi-Fi enabled, LCD displays that were updated from a store-level server through a dedicated network. System periodically suffered periods that the vendor could not explain where the processor and memory utilization spiked to 100%.
Action: Assembled 800,000 observations from server and system logs, performed a correlation study between episodes of system saturation and running processes, produced a detailed report and provided the results to the vendor's engineering manager
Result:
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Challenge: The project required a significant amount of development work that was sequenced and executed according to an agreed order of priority. Unfortunately, the customer began to push tasks to the top of the priority list after my team had already started working according to the original schedule. The result of this behavior was to waste development hours and delay the overall schedule.
Action: I discussed the situation with the customer project manager and determined that the members of his organization had not thought the situation through and did not understand the impact, even though I brought it up several times. I established the policy that the customer team could change task priority up to one week prior to the scheduling meeting that we conducted each Monday, but could not make any changes past that point.
Result: