Program Management
International Satellite Communications Provider

Business Challenge

The IT department for this client was having difficulty managing concurrent projects across the booking, billing, financials, capacity, and data warehouse teams. Four major projects kicked off within two month of each other and the client needed assistance interfacing with the business teams to collect, process, and effectively disseminate information back to the appropriate IT groups as well as drive tasks to ensure the projects were completed on time.

Solution

Acumen Solutions created a straightforward project management organization using their PMO best practices. As part of the established office, they brought in project managers to lead the key projects. The team performed project management for three critical concurrent initiatives: a Siebel booking overhaul and upgrade, a financial systems upgrade and production support, and the systems integration for an $800M acquisition.

Acumen Solutions established a simple governance structure of three levels including a steering committee of affected business executives, a working team of key decision-makers under those executives and a light PMO comprised of Acumen Solutions project managers and the senior managers for the IT organization whose systems were impacted. The PMs facilitated communications and coordination between the business and IT for progress reports, issue escalations and major business-affecting decisions as well as communications related to roll-out, training and deployment.

The PMs leveraged existing management tools such as iTrack, eRoom and Rational’s Clearquest for issue management, documentation collaboration, and defect tracking respectively. To allow simple tracking and centralized access for all team members, the team also established new management tools including requirements management databases, re-usable software testing reports, and status reports.

By working closely with business contacts, the PMs ensured that the business could articulate their requirements and validate proposed IT approaches. The PMs also coordinated with application managers to produce the project schedules, levels of effort and impact analysis. This process included factoring in major project components including data migration, system integration as well as structured and user acceptance testing.

Finally, the team was instrumental in determining and resolving issues that were likely to impact timelines or scope. For example, when software quality was found to be low and requiring more iterations, the PM team would temporarily matrix resources over to the development team and system testing teams from other groups in order to minimize the schedule impacts.

Return on Investment

The Acumen team enabled the provider to tackle multiple major corporate initiatives simultaneously by delivering the projects on schedule. Successful delivery of the system integration associated with the acquisition enabled the Commercial Operations team to assume booking and billing responsibilities ahead of schedule and reduce the monthly maintenance fee paid to the company selling the assets. It also minimized impacts to customers on the acquired satellites allowing our client to penetrate the desirable North American market and complete their global network as well as assume relationships with the largest video customers in the world. Timely delivery of the financial systems upgrade helped bring disparate groups together to complete testing cycles on Oracle 11i and secure sign-off by the business in a highly contentious atmosphere. Lastly, the Siebel booking overhaul and upgrade enabled global access to the new global sales force, simplified and centralized system use, and consolidated customers and products onto one strategic integrated business platform.

Technology/Business Expertise

Acumen Solutions offered the client expertise in the following areas: