Chronicles of Zitumbu (Part 1 of 3)
It’s common for many business people to have been involved in an ERP implementation to understand how difficult is to complete the tasks on time, and within budget. This article is not intended to give a lecture in project principles worth a PMP certification, but a description of such challenging, but inspiring journey. People names and places have been changed so confidentiality prevails, but the story is accurate as it occurred before the eyes of the narrator
My new assignment
Recently, the company I work for was acquired by a large holding, and a cascade of changes followed. Reorganizational structure went rampant, my boss “invited” to move abroad, and I found myself looking for opportunities to hold my nails from. Finally, after several closed doors, I received a positive response from top management asking me to join the implementation team. Suddenly, I felt an avalanche of mixed emotions, but at the end I accepted the challenge. Of course, my eternal companion -positive attitude- and I were ready to start this new venture
Project start was around the corner and my new boss, and I needed to build a team. Gladly, we were able to scavenge urgently needed resources from two sources: a recent implementation (not precisely successful) and from a cancelled project. Still, we were short in one resource so we requested it to HR (usually a painful process in our company, I wonder how this is tackled outside)
Design Phase
Having a strong business process foundation helps a lot or at least that’s what experience had taught us in previous implementations; however, this was going to be different, pretty damn difficult.
All started on a cool Monday morning at Zitumbu, a promising emergent country, and recipient of this global initiative. We met local management team during kick off meeting, and Charlie, the head of project implementation for this continent attended it remotely as later on I would realize was his favorite way to be “present”, pretty similar to Charlie’s Angels boss, the popular TV series of the late 70s-early 80s (for those born after 1980, Charlie’s Angels the movie released in 2000 could give you a taste of how these three awesome female detectives received instructions from a speaker, all the time!
Fine, let’s go back to the story. It resulted that during the kick off meeting everything went fine with project structure, rollout strategy, and solution overview. Then, the previously constructive interruptions left for irreverent critique when the number of standardized global processes appeared on the screen: 134, broken down by area. Alarms went off, when taxes -a finance sub-process- showed an insignificant 4. How this was possible? Zitumbu has one of the more complex tax regulations. The spirited finance team debated over the validity of the rest…TO BE CONTINUED
