21. February 2010 by admin.

One of the issues with regulated and partially-regulated utilities such as those in the public sector, is that the actions of the regulator may impact projects already started.  That’s the cautionary tale this week out of New Zealand:

TrustPower announced to the stock exchange this month that it had suspended work on an $18 million project to replace its billing and customer management systems with Oracle software and would probably have to write off a portion of the $9.5m it had spent on the system to date.

Meridian Energy put a project to install Oracle software on hold in December in similar circumstances. Contact Energy last year raised eyebrows within the industry by budgeting up to $80m to replace its systems with software from Germany’s SAP.

Contact would not comment on whether it believed any unnecessary complexities in the electricity market were behind the big bill, or had contributed to a decision by its original implementation partner, IBM, to pull out of the project, but said it was now pressing ahead with the investment.

TrustPower spokesman Graeme Purches says it became clear Oracle’s software would need to be extensively changed to meet the demands of the New Zealand market, so TrustPower had decided to review its options.

Oracle had tendered software used in Australia that both companies believed would do the job, but the difficulty of dealing with 28 electricity lines companies that had their own ways of calculating tariffs, reconciliation with the wholesale market, and a variety of metering technologies meant the software would need to be largely rewritten.

"New Zealand is a complex market and it is probably no coincidence that three companies have had to pause projects and they are all in New Zealand."

Oracle was not to blame, he says. "Maybe there was an issue about us not communicating in enough detail what we were expecting."

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18. February 2010 by admin.

Fred O. Angel, Jr., the Customer Operations Administrator and CIS Implementation Project Manager for Chesterfield County Department of Utilities, has written an article published on the Water World site, about effective CIS implementation project management.  Fred writes:

In summary, the key to being an effective and successful project manager is doing the right thing, at the right time, utilizing the right people for the benefit of the project team, staff, customers, the utility, and the CIS implementation project.

Being named project manager for your utility’s CIS implementation project is an opportunity and challenge. One’s project management skills will most likely determine the success or failure of the project. As PM, you lead the project effort by setting expectations and communicating effectively, managing and resolving risk, and providing leadership. A strong project manager leads his or her team with trust, fairness, and integrity — which in turn encourages respect, confidence, support, and involvement from everyone affiliated with the project.

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14. February 2010 by admin.

The stoush between SAP and Waste Management as reported by PC World highlights the issues at the heart of vendor selection:

SAP used "fake" and "rigged" software demonstrations to convince Waste Management its products were a good fit, according to the trash hauler. But after years of work and great expense, the product did not work satisfactorily, Waste Management claims.

But SAP has denied any wrongdoing and counters that Waste Management breached its contracts with SAP by failing to "timely and accurately define its business requirements" and provide "sufficient, knowledgeable, decision-empowered users and managers" to work on the implementation.

First: identify your business requirements.  Setting out a checklist of essential functionality might sound like overkill, but incorporating the checklist and the vendor’s responses into the contract may help give clarity later.  Checklist availability can be found on our main site and at Public Sector Assets

Second: be in control of the selection process.  Define the script of what you want the vendor to demonstrate.  Home in on the key aspects.  Ask who else uses the software in that way

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11. February 2010 by admin.

There’s not much new in getting a successful project.  Here’s the latest list from BigNews Biz on how to implement Business Intelligence:

1. Focus on business processes and requirements. Often companies get tied up in the technical capabilities and ignore how you want your business operations to run and what your key business requirements are. Once you have this defined, you can engage in a more effective BI system.
2. Focus on achieving a healthy ROI (Return on Investment). This requires developing a high-level business case, establishing key performance measures, setting baselines and targets for those measures, and tracking performance after go-live.
3. Strong project management and resource commitment. Ensure you have a strong project manager to support and participate in the project.
4. Commitment from company executives. Besides support from a CIO or Director, support from the CEO and top management is also needed.
5. Take time to plan up front. Ensure things are done right at the beginning of the project rather than spending time to fix the problems later on.
   Ensure adequate training and change management. Help people to understand and effectively use the BI system.

Take out the references to BI and it could be any software project.

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7. February 2010 by admin.

Computerworld has quoted from a Panorama consulting report that shows how companies are saving money during software implementations in these recessionary times:

1. A decrease of over 20 percent from 2008 to 2010 is attributed to efforts to limit IT budgets and reduce implementation scopes in response to weak economic conditions. The tradeoff to these reduced implementation costs is that companies are less satisfied with their ERP investments than in years past.

2. Decreasing implementation timelines can be partially attributed to a weak economy which has forced companies to more tightly manage implementations. Further, a number of companies decreased the scope of their enterprise software initiatives.

3. The survey found that 54 percent of ERP implementations went over budget, a slight decrease from the 2008 data when 59 percent of implementations cost more than planned.  The finding is attributed to the fact that many organizations in the study failed to identify and budget implementation costs not attributable to software vendors, such as project management, organizational change management, hardware upgrades and the like.

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