Automation of Sales Commission Program
We were able to help this client develop a practical schedule, bring together multiple vendors around a single project strategy, and ensure their new platform was ready to launch by their target date.
TIGHT TIMELINE
This organization’s deadline for the project was linked to their fiscal year and didn’t have any wiggle room. There was also a significant time-cost trade-off, with dollar figures incurred each day the implementation was late. These penalties were significant, adding up to several hundred thousand dollars each month. The scope of the effort was intense, however, and it was determined that the organization’s one-size-fits-all strategy wouldn’t allow them to meet that inflexible target date. Without a top-level plan, our client didn’t have a roadmap to achieve their goals on time. It was critical that the project is tightly controlled from start to finish, to ensure compliance with the planned end date.
SCATTERED STAKEHOLDERS FUNCTIONAL SILOS
Though our client’s technology implementation partners brought deep experience in software development and deployments, the vendors were located around the globe, and several stakeholder groups were diverse entities. Time zone differences, language barriers, and operational silos created communication challenges that threatened to derail the project if progress couldn’t be appropriately monitored or if there were misunderstandings about expectations.
With multiple teams coming at the project from different directions, each already had its ideas about core responsibilities, activity scheduling and sequencing, risk assessment, and how the system implementation should be planned and executed.
BUDGET CONSTRAINTS
The project had a capped funding source and couldn’t exceed its earmarked budget. This meant that resources had to be tightly managed, and the project needed to be executed correctly the first time additional follow-on or clean-up efforts weren’t in the budget, nor were labor charges to cover unexpected support if any of the system’s components didn’t function the first time correctly. Our client was in a challenging position and knew they could face a failed project if the implementation’s risks weren’t fully identified and mitigated.
RESOURCE CHALLENGES
Everyone on the project team had a full workload, which limited their availability for project tasks and had the potential to impact the schedule. Also, other strategic projects were competing for these same internal resources. Considering the organization’s budget limitations bringing in temporary or contract staff was impractical.
It was critical that everyone knew what they needed to be working on to maximize their time if they wanted to meet their target deadline and deliver the expected results.
UNITING UNDER A SHARED STRATEGY
Our first step was to bring the team together, take a step back, and construct a top-level plan that realistically identified the necessary work. It was essential to get all stakeholders working under our proven Duration-Driven methodology. A two-day training session ensured that the client team understood the basic concepts, techniques, and tools of our approach to project management. After that, we assembled the right people and mapped out a strategy to accomplish the project objectives, knowing their early planning efforts were not in alignment with their target date. It was essential to develop a plan that contained the appropriate level of detail, which could be augmented by additional planning as the project progressed. This empowered the team to work under a shared strategy and maintain control over their inflexible budget and timeline.
DURATION-BASED ESTIMATES
The implementation of our Duration-Driven planning process was the first step in ensuring this client’s technology deployment project stayed on track. Project Helpline’s consultants worked with internal staff and outside vendors to gather accurate duration estimates based on total elapsed time for the project’s activities. We then organized project tasks into a dynamic, network-based project plan using the team member commitments, activity durations, and activity precedence relationships. Employees were able to provide a valuable perspective on how much time they had available, informing the plan with highly accurate duration and timing data. Even as glitches in software development required frequent replanning throughout the project, the Project Helpline process allowed our customer to maintain alignment with the final schedule and ensure the project remained on track at each step.
Instead of treating the software project’s tasks as a standalone workload, we also asked employees to evaluate their daily routine activities and commitments to other projects – to determine how their responsibilities would be incorporated alongside everything else they had to accomplish.
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT TOOLS
Given the looming financial impacts and other risks of delays, the use of Project Helpline’s web-based update system was crucial to ensuring the organization had current information on the project’s progress at each step of the way. Our consultants gathered updates from the team and reported the status across the stakeholder base each week. This helped to overcome the hurdles associated with multiple dispersed vendor groups and provided one platform for tracking concerns and managing updates. Potential schedule issues could be proactively identified and addressed with sufficient time available to develop a resolution and ensured project stakeholders received timely, detailed reports throughout each phase of the project.
ROBUST COMMUNICATION
With such a diverse group of stakeholders—located around the world and bringing very specific skill sets to the effort—clear and concise communication was a top priority. To develop strong communication channels within the project team, we facilitated several sessions with internal staff and outside providers to identify resource and timing issues. The resulting data was key to the development of a plan that was workable and realistic. Maintaining these excellent communication flows across every group that was participating in the project gave the organization confidence towards heading to the go-live date — partly because they received ongoing validation that their plan was achievable and remained on schedule.
Our customer’s enterprise-wide sales commission system project was completed on schedule and budget. The team’s full transition to our proven approach allowed each employee to estimate how and when their project-related tasks could be executed among their regular workload. This resulted in a more accurate schedule and a project plan the organization and its leadership team knew could be accomplished on time. With a comprehensive plan developed with their input, each stakeholder group was able to focus on their priority tasks, and individuals were accountable for their activities from start to finish.