Management at Customer’s will and chaos under the hood

This is an imagination and similarities to real situations may be accidental. Objective of this narration is to share one of the possible project management and derive learnings from there.

Story goes like this, an organization (NextP) gets a huge contract to participate in product development in development WiMax CPE, first of its kind from tier 1 customer (Eagles) and want to take it up at any cost. Core team is put in place and right from begining customer is dictating what is to be done and how it is to be done, with primary focus on his own risk management. His huge money and organization future is at stake of his own team and NextP’s capability to deliver.

Amongst the key things that Eagles put in place/dictates include following:

• Appointing colocated Eagles’s experts
• UnCompromised reviews (weekly, milestone)
• Setting up checklists that must be fulfilled before payments
• Quality Audits of program
• Few training programs to rampup team
• Risk sharing in terms of profits and reduced upfront costs
• Divide 2 year development lifecycle into 4-6 months of increments
• Strong configuration management to get all deliveries in their Eagles’ system and not located at NextP IT systems

I think Eagles’ were expert at how to get things done from sub-contractors. While they put up above checks and balances, they didn’t get too much into the details of execution.

It was approx. 100+ team size that was engaged to develop and test the product and later integrate to the other network elements.

Apparently Eagles had failed on CMMi Level 2 self-assessment and NextP had processes matured to level 5. Level 5 maturity was one critical factor in delivering confidence to customer.

With this background, starts the action at NextP. Right from day one the struggle starts. Guess what would be the first challenge ? — to get the 60+ team at short notice with relevant experience. What finally happened, all freshers at the disposal of core team to work with. Fortunate enough, the batch was of bright engineers, who learnt fast and also customer knew this limitation and was relaxed in the begining and paid for this rampup.

What could have went wrong in this particular stage ? the effort spent in this rampup didn’t result into any useful work for the product and also no good processes turned out to help NextP face the above mentioned approach of Eagles to mitigate their risks. NextP management on the similar note should have similar brainstorming and driven establishing relevant processes to ensure as vendor they don’t fall in trap of paying for all wrong decisions of Eagles.

• One good and most visible thing would be the change requests coming from time to time (always happen in all past projects)
• and second would be difficult to get approvals which was key to getting payments/bonuses.

This will continue….