Project Management Rescues Troubled Multi-Partner Project 

 

Business Challenge: 

This 1600-location retail organization was in the process of having a mission-critical application re-written to manage products and rebates.  The new application needed to interface with an existing store database, the supplier database, and a Revelation database.  The company had contracted with a new application development shop to do the re-write, and key components of the solution were also being written by internal team members.  Yet another partner was providing business analysis support.

The project lacked project management discipline and was over budget and behind schedule.  The organization was concerned at the time and money investment with no tangible results in sight. 

Solution:

Oakwood was brought in to set project management direction for each component of the project; there were nearly ten separate efforts that supported the application.  The Oakwood project manager addressed project management inconsistencies to ensure customer satisfaction across all existing projects that make up this application.  In addition, the PM developed sound planning across all projects and implemented effective communication mechanisms between all project stakeholders.  This included working very closely with the application developer to ensure that the project stayed within scope and budget.  Issue and Risk tracking was another key component that the Oakwood PM implemented.

Benefits:

Bringing project management discipline to this out-of-control situation had very tangible results:

  • Controlled scheduling of tasks and resources
  • Issues and Risks that were addressed early and accurately.  Numerous project delays were avoided as a result.
  • Effective communication between the corporate sponsor and with each developer included robust status reporting and weekly reviews of each component of the program, resulting in project-wide accountability.

Oakwood's project management expertise, as brought to bear in this situation, prevented the project from escalating more out of control, and in fact reduced the client's risk and expense.  From the point at which Oakwood's PM got involved, the project stayed on track and on budget, and a bit of the prior slippage was recovered as well.