2.4. Project Context
Within this strategic context, the MyProj project is particularly critical to MyCo. In this project, a core back-office system for customer management is being redesigned to improve customer-handling activities and provide greater analytical capabilities across several disparate customer data sources. MyProj has the following important characteristics:
- Worldwide delivery and deployment. MyProj involves not only the collaboration of development and delivery resources from many locations but also the global deployment and management of the resultant solution.
- Significant criticality, size, and investment. MyProj is a 2-million-euro investment and involves almost 2,800 staff days of effort within a broader 10-million-euro system improvement program. The planned elapsed time of the project is 1 year, with some significant business impact if that date is not met.
- Outsourced delivery model. The majority of the effort on MyProj is contracted with an external system integrator in a “time and materials” contract.
- Focus on reusable assets. MyProj both uses and contributes assets that have been used and can be reused in other projects. These assets include software code, component specifications, and documentation.
To manage costs, MyProj’s system integrator uses delivery centers across the world. Using up to 80 percent of resources in offshore locations, MyProj’s offshore delivery model features the following:
- Offshore teams that are handpicked based on required skill sets
- Offshore project managers and technical leads who spend an initial period colocated with the onshore management team (a so-called landed phase) before returning to their offshore locations
- Regular high-touch visits by a core team and the customer to manage progress and create more informal relationships among the extended team
- Explicit expectation management of surface risks as early as possible
- The enactment of a collaborative solution-oriented management approach to analyze and resolve any blocking problems that arise
- High levels of collaboration across the teams to ensure synchronization at all stages of development and delivery