A case study into real example of ‘out of the blue’ risk and issue management and the importance of good governance structures for programmes.
When you have a plan for anything in life the real skill of Programme and Project Management is in anticipating the threats and ‘what ifs’ to the change you are undertaking and creating contingency plans to deal with those eventualities. The better you and your board are at working in this way the more resilient the change delivery becomes and the more options you will have. Often, the result of this continuous feedback loop results in new deliverables being commissioned and so we sometimes lose sight of the process we went through to a position where we can be prepared should something left field happen.
Businesses rarely go into a BCP situation right? So what are the chances that everyone hits BCP at the same time? Welcome to March 2020.
3 weeks ago Coronavirus was an South East Asian problem, trade and travel routes were open without restrictions and most governments seemed largely unconcerned about the issue. It would not go ‘big’ just as SARS and MERS had remained localised. I was leading a team through a particularly pleasing and successful first deployment of a brand-new service delivery platform into an ISP. 3 weeks ago, we had our first teams go live on the new system and it worked really well. We were on a roll, the engineers, delivery and stakeholder teams were very buoyant and engaged. In 3 weeks’ time we were due to transfer the entire engineering team in the UK to the new system. Testing in full flow, training being finalised and ready to deliver, teams up to their necks in data migration. The usual.
In the first week of March however it was already clear that this virus would have a bigger impact than it’s predecessors and so as a business and a change structure we started to work through the risks and issues and coordinate responses. As the second week in March progressed the board were contemplating the logistics of running an ISP remotely and using the BCP handbook to shape the outcomes. As a Change leadership team, we concentrated on 3 main issues.
- Could the project teams still create the deliverables remotely?
- Could the project still be delivered to the business remotely?
- And even if we could, would we want to?
Could the project teams still create the deliverables remotely?
The project team had an operational base in a single place and initially we thought that was a good thing, however the SI and several key technical resources were remote and the engineers were in multiple locations so we were already dealing with an element of distribution in the Programme.
Increasing our use of Teams and SharePoint collaborations with multiple authors at the same time was a baseline tool.
Establishing a revised virtual meeting room for collaboration was also key.
Ensuring that the touch points on the teams from stand ups to testing and bug calls were arranged in the diary in a way that gave structure to the day, the week and the delivery cycle was also reviewed and reworked.
Ensuring that the team had access to all the systems remotely that it had onsite was also key, in this regard we were blessed being a well structured ISP these things were second nature and recent development had increased the security wrapper around this to be able to deliver with no change in security profile. These things will become essential takeaways for businesses after this is all over. It will become crucial to be able to project the business philosophy into any place and that is going to make for a big HR challenge.
Could the project still be delivered to the business remotely?
Having changed the plans and concluded that the delivery team could still deliver, we needed to address the deliverables with the engineering teams and see what changes could be made to see if they could be supported to deliver. User Acceptance Testing, Training and Communications and Early Life support all would need to be addressed.
For UAT the conclusion was that with Unified Comms through ‘Teams’ that the impact was largely related to the fact it would just take longer to test than face to face testing support.
Training needed a complete rethink, however, classroom training is always superior it being tactile and encouraging interaction through the groups. A comprehensive programme of face to face training, embedded training in groups, and work books had been developed. The mix needed to change. If the engineers were to get the training and support they would require whilst in isolation, we would need additional sessions and more checking back with their readiness state would be required, crucially again we needed additional time to deliver.
Our original early life support at the end of February had worked really well. The engineering team managers sat with the project team in a friendly early life hub, as close to the users as possible. It was smooth, problems and questions got to the team easily and where resolved by the group efficiently and quickly. Now we needed to create something which replicated the feel of that support to give the engineers confidence whilst being remote.
Again, utilising some of the best features of Teams we would create an engineering hub and connected project team hub to allow the same flows of information. The traditional conference bridge would become a video drop in centre.
And even if we could, would we want to?
From a programme executive point of view, having the option to continue even at increased effort, duration and cost is one thing. We needed to work through the practicalities of delivering a great engineer and customer service experience in a remote environment and then weigh up the anticipated changes in customer demand which external events would force on our clients. We set this against the business case impacts and the cost of delaying delivery with the running costs of a system we could not use. Then factored in the business strategy re-planning which was moving at pace as the business struggled to understand what where the likely outcomes to business plan.
At the decision point it was judged too important to the business to not press ahead. As things, stand we built in a three week delay. One week to allow the engineers to transition to home working and 2 weeks added time for UAT and training cycles.
One thing I am always looking to instil in my programmes and teams. ‘It’s easy to concentrate on the threats and challenges in any situation, but we should find time and space to look for the opportunities presented as well.’ We have a fully functioning project and development team a backlog of features and we have just been given extra time so let’s bring some of those features forward and make the first product even better than MVP.
Predict-a-Score
I have some predictions. Lets see how we do against them in the weeks ahead
When we went off site the team was split, only a few weeks or long term? My thoughts were that I felt I was unlikely to finish the assignment back in the office and this situation would be around for a long time rather than 3 weeks.
I think the UK consistently under invests in its infrastructure, I think we may be able to add the Telecoms backbone to the list of essentials we don’t look after enough.
Given my past experience of delivering in multiple continents let alone living rooms, I predict that we will be able to replicate the look and feel of the original Go live and we will get a successful launch.
The business will surprise itself at how quickly it will stabilise support operations and it achieves a new normal. 22 days to make or break a habit.
The world will surprise itself at how much and fast it can change when it has an imperative. Scientists will become the new heroes and treatments and vaccines will be completed in weeks when they are given funding to change the world, as in the pace of arms development in a war the human race will find the keys quickly.
Home working will become a permanent change to our working lives and ‘Teams’ is finally going to make video conferencing the norm rather than a reluctant exception.
It will be interesting to see in mid May how we fair. I sense another article in the making.