Client Success Stories - Oil Company
In the IT department a
time-bomb was ticking. The members of the project team
for the division's critical data warehouse initiative
was 6 months into a 9 month project--and the team was
still mired in gathering customer requirements. This project
was critical to delivering performance insights to the
division's business analysts. With the right information,
these analysts would be able to make better pricing decisions
that could result in millions of additional dollars in
revenue; and pinpoint the sources of customer shipment
issues quickly to reduce lost revenue and costs associated
with their correction. The prospects were grim for delivering
these benefits on time. |
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Enter QRPD. Half-way through attending a QRPD workshop at
a recent conference, the Director of the group, Terri, commissioned
Global Brain to aid her team. "We need QRPD to get us
through this project."
The Global Brain team conducted a lessons learned meeting
on a recently-completed project; conducted team interviews;
took the entire data warehouse team through the 2-day QRPD
workshop; and ran a kickoff session for the new project -
all in one week! The challenge of the project included a broad-based
set of customers, and as with many projects, a huge number
of possible features that could have filled a project twice
as long.
What the team needed most to get the project back on track,
was the power of the QRPD Project Vision process, to help
them cut through all the possible requirements and reach a
short-list of business-critical features to implement. The
project kickoff day was therefore spent conducting a Vision
session with the team members and key business representatives.
By changing their emphasis from detailed "data, features,
and requirements" to the customer-and-benefit driven
language of the QRPD Vision, the team was able to narrow in
on the 5 Key Success Factors the business users needed more
insight on. Then they identified the key data warehouse design
elements needed to deliver those insights. Overnight, the
project scope became doable- maybe even in the short remaining
time on the timeline.
But to make it, the Global Brain team also realized that
the team needed the concept of QRPD "chicken tests".
The team was undertaking several technical innovations, including
bringing in a totally new software package as one element
of their system, and had been planning to simply integrate
the new software when the time came. Instead, based on QRPD,
they devised early tests to determine if that software could
deliver on key promises within their design. These chicken
tests uncovered some unexpected issues, that the team was
able to fix in time, rather than finding out during full integration
and "blowing up" too late to recover.
Finally, the team needed a huge culture change in its relationship
with the users. In past projects, business users did not get
to see (and didn't want to see or use) any of the features
until the project was absolutely done, and the system was
perfect and ready for official acceptance test. Past projects
had been plagued by misunderstandings of customer needs, outright
rejection of the delivered system, and huge amounts of late
rework. Global Brain led the team through its planning effort
to identify an iterative approach to the system development,
and key points for bringing in users to play with and critique
feature prototypes. They also showed the team and key users
how even these early versions could deliver insights, answers,
and ultimately extra revenue even before the entire system
was polished up and fully deployed.
In the end, through implementing the above key QRPD techniques,
the team came within 2 weeks of their original 9-month schedule-
even though they adopted QRPD with only 3 months to go and
at a time that their goals seemed hopeless! The power of common-sense
but high-leverage QRPD techniques was proved when the division's
business users got the system they needed, with the most critical
features, in the timeframe originally promised.
Because of this phenomenal success, as time went by (two
years) and new people came on board, Teri felt it was time
to bring Global Brain in again to quickly invigorate new teams
with the techniques and benefits of QRPD. Plus she remembered
that the QRPD book advised, "Spend 50% of your time with
'outsider' - and 50% of your outsider time with "wackos"
(a Tom Peters phrase for people with unique ways for approaching
tough problems!) - to keep an objective view of what you're
doing and stay open to new approaches and amazing possibilities.
." She picked up the phone! QRPD was quickly deployed
with another new r project manager and his team (located in
another geographical location!), and the team went on to turn
in another very solid, business-critical project performance
using QRPD.
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