2024-03-15 PPMO Meeting notes

Getting to green

@Karen Israel

• Retro: https://lucid.app/lucidspark/7701430b-1022-42f9-8735-e70e519243b8/edit?invitationId=inv_44749103-953e-43e3-96cc-fe488ac42aec&page=0_0#

• Things that went well

  • Documentation

  • Team work and camraderie

  • Mock go live

  • Testing

• Learned

  • better docs on config

  • testing status

  • guide and manage vendors, set expectations

• Differently

  • better understood vendor’s role

  • defining roles and project needs at the onset

  • more resources

    • added PM, QA, BSA, sr manager

  • ask vendor to document all their work

• Challenges

  • understanding the vendor role, if they were supposed to drive or provide support

  • wasnt a project plan or schedule until reboot

  • access

  • multiple syncs

  • resources

Major takeaways

• Documentation

• Preserving the go live checklist

• Defining roles, responsibilities,

• Having the testers defined early w/ necessary access

• Blocking time for testing sessions was helpful

How was team able to get to green?

• Teamwork: present, accountable, communicative

  • Everyone genuinely wanted to help

• Dedicated testing sessions and dashboards

  • created focus time and clarity of progress

• Hard deadline

  • always started meetings with overview of key dates (including with vendor)

• Visibility and stakeholder support

  • also reinforces accountability

• As best as possible, lay out target schedule; creates urgency where needed

• Forcing function to document test cases

Size of project team?

• Core team: BSA, QA, PM, Tech leads were core team (relatively small)

• Vendor: just a few from the vendor side (relatively small)

  • Did you share smartsheet with them? In mtgs, though not provisionied; they were in Jira and collab

• Impact: touched every dept and user on campus and health, students and employees (very large)

  • Informing sys admin groups early, getting list of critical sites, setting up office hours and testing sessions

  • ~50 responses to critical site list

Share experiences on working with contractors and adding contractors

@Mindy Peng

• Staff aug

  • Add resources

• Lead an implementation

  • Drives and staff

• Guide on side / support an implementation

  • Expert support, to teach us

Use case:

• External AHs, where onboarding Slower to do the work for external builds, integrations

• Challenges:

  • Quality issues, and subsequent low trust with this vendor

  • Why did we pick this vendor?

• Possible solutions:

  • Escalate issue, but no alternate was identified

    • However, we now have a possible alternate

      • Escalate again

    • Run up with proposed change, include examples where there were quality issues, along with what the cost impact of the change would be

Sometimes we also have trust issues, even when there are not vendor quality issues

• Can be the party that gets blamed

Best practices

• Important to manage expectations that there will be issues and bugs

• Important to set expectations that projects needs to be a partnership (not concierge) and behave as colleagues

  • Setting / defining end users as the ‘business’ or ‘customer' vs our colleagues can result in an unhealthy dynamic

    • System users and stakeholders?

• Stakeholder with the vendor to do formal reviews on issues, risks, billing, any team dynamic concerns

  • Ensure ownership at the right level from the vendor

• Create smaller SOWs at first, to vet the vendor

  • Create more defined SOWs

  • Not letting urgency sweep through an undefined SOW (winds up costing more time and spin)

  • Include PMO in SOW definition and finalization

• Relationship is key with the vendor, like any relationship, to maximize value (output and quality) from the vendor

Variance and opportunity

• SOW specifics

• When PM/PMO is engaged in the SOW process

Share wins and cross functional project impacts and challenges

all

• X functional

• Wins

• Challenges

Putting the tech in technical PM

Technical Concepts

AI

Closing projects! Should be Live

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Closing projects! Should be Done

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