Infosys-Oracle Blog : Critical Success Factors for Implementation projects

Having managed fairly large implementation projects from offshore namely among them being for a Banking Major & Global power leader , I would like to list down the critical success factors and the key points that we should not lose sight of .

Effort estimation of a project should drive the schedule and Go Live date
Solution Acceptance
PMO governance
Tighter control and tracking process
Data Migration
Infrastructure Planning
Performance/Stress Testing
Cut Over
End User Adoption
Risk & Readiness Assessment
Stakeholder Management & Responsibility Definition
Resource Allocation

Effort estimation of a project should drive the schedule and Go Live date and not the other way around. Working backwards is more or less a recipe for failure. For the Banking major, the program already had a Go Live date fixed and committed even before the Requirements phase and estimation for Build phase was completed and no points for guessing we couldn’t meet the date for various extraneous and unforeseen circumstances

Solution acceptance : Extensions are inevitable in any implementation and that’s a fact we all have to live with as there is no ‘’one size fits all’ package available. However whilst accepting the inevitability of extensions, it is important to keep in mind that extensions have a continuous impact in terms of maintainability of the implemented system. For the Global Power Leader, Infosys implementation methodology was further refined to include a well laid out presentation of solution options for several business processes gaps (along with Pros and Cons) for helping the super users’ decision making (47+ KDD got submitted). Result was minimal change request & high user acceptability of the overall delivered solutions with several extensions getting eliminated.

PMO governance: Ever changing change requests severely affect the solution stabilization which ties to the point above on Solution Acceptance. The later we go into the implementation cycle, it is imperative to enforce only ‘MUST & SHOWSTOPPER’ extensions to be approved. We should also enforce strict discipline & control in implementing Soft & Hard code freeze as this cannot be a moving date. A fully accountable and enforcing PMO needs to be constituted comprising of both client & Infosys representatives to ensure governance

Non-standard extensions should also have a tighter control and tracking process. It is a must to prepare a Business Process- Customization Mapping matrix & a Traceability matrix of all extensions. This will immensely help in future upgrades & also ongoing tasks where patches applied overwrite non standard extensions in standard code

Data Migration : This is the most important part to be successfully planned for a successful go-live as it involves migration of both master & transaction data. A minimum of 4 Dry runs should be planned and woven into the execution cycle with a dedicated Migration instance. All errors and the cause for the errors need to flow back into a master document that serves as a check list to be incorporated before the subsequent iteration. Reconciliation scripts need to be built for every entity that has to be migrated and the results should be published for user verification

Infrastructure Planning: Infrastructure Planning should be done and validated at the start of the project rather than mid-way. For the banking major, we were contracted to do the Upgrade from 11.0.3 to 11.5.10 and implement new modules & custom bolt-ons. The Program Management and Governance and Infrastructure piece rested with the client. Though we were operating as per what we were contracted for, the client didn’t have the foresight to evaluate whether the existing production hardware used in 11.0.3 would scale upto the new volume of data, additional users, additional modules . This resulted in a delayed Go live though the entire functionality was ready for deployment and it was expected that as a trusted partner of choice, we should have been pragmatic and advised the client on the same

Performance/Stress Testing : Performance Testing of critical business processes HAS to be budgeted for with proper simulation using Load Testing tools like LOADRUNNER. Due diligence should be performed well in advance along with the development phase and the scripts for the same need to be prepared/simulated alongside the BUILD phase in time before SIT so that we have a sufficient window before GO LIVE.

Cut Over : Most projects have a small cutover window of not more than 4-5 days wherein the entire transaction data needs to be migrated along with readiness testing and sanity testing. We should ensure there are no manual transactions that are expected to be performed as these have a highly probable chance of being underestimated in volume. For the Global Power major, we had to do reverse moves in 10.7 for all WIP transactions on uncompleted jobs and after transaction data migration, do the moves manually in R12 on the new jobs created. It was assumed in talks with business that the volumes for these move transactions would be minimal and this will be a manual activity. It came as a shock to us when this count ran into thousands closer to UAT and we ended up automating the entire process .Had this not been done, the Cut Over window would not have been sufficient at all. We should give due thought to archival and purge of the historical data prior to the project that results in lesser outage window & better performance of the instance etc

End User Adoption : The biggest risk envisaged by the Client’s Senior Management and PMO is the effective training to large diversified user base that can span a sophisticated production engineer to computer-illiterate warehouse labor. It should be our endeavour to deliver job-oriented, process-focused training (Training Methods), develop concise and work instructions based training contents (Training Development).Last but not the least, make training documents accessible through uploading it as an online help. For the Global Power Leader, Infosys developed and deployed high quality 300+ Oracle Tutor documents and 47+ Oracle UPK simulations which have become ever reliable asset for the client in the years to come. Oracle tutor was envisaged as single means of documenting end-to-end business processes, organizational policies, roles and responsibilities, business flow diagrams and job-specific training document. This best practice should be followed and encouraged by all implementations rather than going for the conventional mode of ‘Ppt and Module based training’

Risk & Readiness Assessment : Risks pertaining to the program need to be continuously documented and mitigation strategies adopted for good health of the project . Many implementations are usually transformation programs with multiple IT & business initiatives as part of the strategy. This leads to dependency on several parallel running programs . It becomes imperative then to monitor risks using well known frameworks such as ‘Failure Mode & Effectivity analysis’ (FMEA) which do help us prioritize Risks based on Severity, Occurrence, Detectability. For the Global power leader, we had also a readiness assessment conducted on 4 dimensions – System, Data, People, Others to test preparedness & readiness before UAT and point out the ‘Lose Sleep’ / ‘Watch Out’ areas with mitigation steps. Both these practices clearly helped us attack all tumultuous and nagging bottlenecks upfront and take the complex project go-live on schedule & within budget

Stakeholder Management & Responsibility Definition : It is imperative that we list down all activities to be performed per phase of the implementation and use the well adopted RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to distribute stake in the activity across various Project Management, Functional & Technical functions.

Resource Allocation : Dedicated resource allocation to critical projects is a must , especially around Subject matter experts . However I have also noticed that it doesn’t pay to go just by ‘on paper and number of years’ experience. One should have a good balanced team comprising of few senior folks to pave the way & direction and rest comprising of junior resources who have the hunger to prove themselves. We should give people a chance to deliver and more often than not with the right direction, they will surpass our expectations

Though what I have mentioned above is not oblivious to all, it is my earnest endeavour to have this serve as a checklist and I have tried to make it as generic as possible citing examples, situations and solutions wherever faced.

- Sanjay Pinto

Sanjay Pinto is a Senior Project Manager with Infosys Technologies Ltd. He has managed various implementation, support & upgrade projects as an offshore delivery anchor in the Oracle EBS space across verticals – Manufacturing, BCM, IHL