Communication & Soft Skills
Dear Jerry:
Thanks for the trust you have put in me and asked me to lead this project. This project is undoubtedly one of its kind in the division and would go on to serve the business well immediately and in the future. Definitely this project had hiccups right from the start – the first possible one was the unfortunate exit of Mark. Well, we accept that as a personal career choice.
Having accepted that, I have spent time in understanding the overall project since having taken over the project as per your directives. I have arrived at two remarkable findings: a. that, the manpower costing seems to be very accurate – almost to the extent that there has been a reduction in what was planned and what has been actually incurred, and b. there has a dramatic increase in the cost of equipment (hardware) and services.
I am not sure of the basis of the estimation process. I am actually finding it a little difficult to understand how the costs of hardware and software were under-estimated. I have actually done a little of background work with our regular hardware vendors and have realized that there has been no steep increase in the price of the components that were intended for use on the project. So I tried analyzing the increase in expenses that we have incurred on the purchase of the hardware. I have come to realize that the there is a change in the configuration of almost all the hardware that we have purchased. For instance, we were looking at purchasing two Intel Quad Core processor based servers but ended up procuring eight of them. The original servers were designed to come with 2 GB RAM, but we procured them with 16 GB RAM. The change in the configuration itself has increased costs dramatically. There have been serious increase in the costs of Hardware Lease and maintenance (133% increase); Data center costs were not factored at the planning stage and we have incurred $5,000 per month and it is foreseen to continue through the life of the project. There has been slight increase in miscellaneous costs too.
While all these are evident to anyone who inspects the costing sheet, I would like to draw your attention to the root cause of the increase. I think I have laid my finger on the root of the problem – there seems to be a disengagement between the business team and the internal IT team on the expectations of the project. The original result of the project was to improve the performance of the system by 100%. However as the project initiated there was a clear demand for implementation of cloud architecture, seamless 24 x 7 connectivity, and that the web server which was earlier outsourced be moved into the organization’s infrastructure. All these three factors have led to the dramatic increase in the cost.
The immediate challenge for me is to clear the lines of communication with the business team and identify if the IT team has effectively captured their expectations or if both the teams are talking in parallel. If IT has been truly capturing the business team expectations, I personally feel we will have state-of-the-art infrastructure that would possibly serve our business needs for the future 5 years without any further substantial infrastructure. Please allow me to invest further effort into getting a better and increased understanding of the business needs as well as also the cost escalation.
Best,
xxxxxx
Sub: Upgrade of Servers and Databases
Dear Sirs!
Having taken over the server and database upgrade project, and having driven it thus far, I feel I must stand up now and put forth a few things so that the upper management team is fully knowledgeable and informed of what is happening on this project.
A few weeks back, I met the General Manager – Sales, of Nissan our closest competitor in the global space. Since it was the Christmas homecoming time, I guess he was in a very jovial mood and was willing to speak. Nissan has implemented an IT system that connects all their salesforce with the head office at Nevada. The team members are always connected and fully in the know of any information that they need to know, on a minute-by-minute basis, including variations in the global steel pricing and the eventual impact of the same on their business in real time. The sales persons on the field are fed information not only on to their laptops, but also key updates on to their mobile phones, through a proprietary app, which they have developed for this purpose. He was claiming that their productivity has increased by almost four and half percent and that the sales force are making far more profitable deals than what they used to earlier.
Information technology has always been a business enabler and has given competitive edge to those who have exploited this technology appropriately for business purpose. I am not going to go into the length of this particular aspect of discussion as all of you are as knowledgeable or even more on this specific aspect of this discussion.
Our business team headed by Vice President – Sales has always strived very hard towards ensuring that we are in the pole position in our business always. VP Sales, I distinctly remember, over the last twenty odd months has conceptualized certain architecture of an IT system that would fully empower each member of our sales force with up-to-date real-time information from our analysts, thereby enabling them to be ahead of the competition and also giving the best to our clients.
While the sales team has made their own process for information update, VP sales has many a time, expressed that if the process were to be upgraded fully by using apt forms of information technology, then the sales team would be fully empowered. Such empowerment would not only boost productivity and profitability of our sales team, but also would place them in a position to have real time production information, which would to a great extent, eliminate delayed deliveries that is a serious concern to all of us. If we were to eliminate this single aspect of customer dissatisfaction in our business, we would have almost always great customer delight. Our products, undoubtedly, are the best in the world and our customers have used them innovatively for purposes way beyond what was originally envisioned within our organization. Such applications have got us great laurels among all the end-users and we have become the de facto standard across the industry. Our competition is measured almost always as a lesser percentage of our offering. This has endowed us with great competitive advantage.
With the recent acquisition of the African mines and the production facility in Central America, we are poised for further consolidation of our market leadership. The production team has always endeavored to ensure that the stringent customer timelines are always met one way or the other and they have always bent backwards in surpassing the customer expectations, many a time, at great discomfort to themselves at both the professional and personal levels.
The human resources department has always been concerned about the amount of pressures that our teams come under, when meeting organizational goals and have always gone to great length in ensuring all our comfort, and they have been very accommodative many a times. All these dimensions point to the fact that there is an intense desire in all of us to be the best amongst all the information difficulty that we currently face. Our teams have been known to literally burn the telephone in trying to get to know the appropriate customer-centric information.
Implementation of appropriate information technology tools would be an ideal business enabler. This brings me back to the current server and database upgrade project that the IT team is working on currently. What was originally envisioned and anticipated to allow sales teams to just login and pull the required information, has now been transformed into a cloud-centric information push architecture that does not so far exist anywhere.
We would be the pioneers of conceptualizing such a system and thus creating an enabler for all our business teams across marketing, sales, production, manufacturing, inventory, and risk. Undoubtedly this system has been driven by our VP sales, whose enthusiasm is infectious and has enthused the rest of the top management team. The current cost and schedule escalations are a direct result of our increasing requirements that will make the implementation of this system, the only one of its kind and also a complete business enabler when fully implemented, by the end of this project.
This project would seamlessly integrate our central server farm with all devices including the smartphones, which are omnipresent today. This kind of a solution would increase business productivity by as much as 12% and customer satisfaction by a whopping 40%. The cost escalations that are seen would be in the range of 12-16% overall, and time escalation would be a huge 100% over what was originally envisaged. While this is a fairly balanced and objective view of this ambitious project, it is sure to have a lot of positive impact on customer satisfaction, employee productivity, workshop productivity, reduced downtimes, and 24x7 information accessibility.
We have stood for being pioneers in our 125 year history of existence and have many a time, changed the contours of how this industry operated. You have my personal guarantee that the implementation of this particular project, which is very demanding on the IT team, would eventually be once such business contour altering preposition in the global steel industry. I am sure the cost and time overruns are a small price to pay for gaining so much.
My Best,
Xxxxx
Travel Agenda and Outline for Site Visit
Guidelines to managing communication and other related issues between the It and the business teams:
One of the classic issues that have always afflicted implementation of information technology projects has been communication gaps between the end users and the IT team. Classically, it has been a common grouse that the IT people have is that the user teams do not understand technology and the business teams always have a grouse that the technology teams are too geeky and they use jargon that they cannot understand.
A conflict situation amidst the IT department and the responsibility with which they are to deal with had been a reality for many years now, precisely since the days the non-technical team of an organization had begun using IT. The IT department is a basically highly complex and multifaceted environment that considers two unique and specific skills sets namely to, craft and maintain.
The language used by an IT department varies dramatically when compared with the business langue as the IT speaks more about aspects like servers, software licenses, technology, technical infrastructure, resources and the capacity of the same. While on the other hand, the business language comprises of things like budgets, turnaround times, optimization, apportionment, schedule run overs, user experience, accountability, compliance, competitive advantage, reporting as well as agility. As a consequence of such high degree of conflicting concerns, business, more often than not, fails to appreciate and understand the complexity that is involved in a seemingly simple request like for instance:
“I need more resources”, or
“What was the cost for user’s project?” Or,
“We need X capability in our product.”
Throughout the life of any particular organizational project, conflicts are a common outcome, which essentially crop up between several professional, technical, interpersonal as well as administrative aspects related to the project. The first and the most important step toward lessening the negative significances of such conflicts is to actually deal with them much before they occur. However, in the current case, such a possibility is completely ruled out as the project was already started and it was delayed, the reasons of which are myriad.
I propose to initially assess the entire project and the reasons that have resulted in its delay. To do this, I would first prefer studying the whole conflict and assimilate all the necessary and relevant background information, which would help me in identifying the possible and underlying reasons that have resulted in the current situation of conflicts.
This being an inter-disciplinary collaboration and cross functional team efforts, there is a very high likelihood of severe communication breakdowns and conflict at workplace. Many a times, issues that have roots in this problem, tend to impact the project so negatively, that it leads to the breakdown and eventual failure of the whole project itself.
The issue that is being faced currently by this organization is nothing strange or isolated. There are always bound to be aspirational issues and various other issues that create problems on who contributed most to the success or even failure of the project; and in the current case, where the project aims to create an exponential impact on the organizational business processes, and dramatically improve employee productivity, thereby finally leading to enhancement in the organizational bottom line, there is definitely a case for clamoring and contradictory claims as well as counter-claims.
This is exactly the malady of the situation that currently exists in the project that is being dealt with, which is also leading to schedule overruns and cost escalation in the same breath. This entire soft skill issue is detrimental to the project as well as the organization at large. This calls for immediate intervention from the managerial teams of both the business team as well as the project implementation team.
There need to be a two-pronged approach in tackling this communication barrier that has arisen in the organization. It is to tackle the communication, both at the verbal communication as well as the written communication aspects. In a verbal communication, the receiving party must vocalize what has been received and understood. This goes to confirm what has been actually said and if that is what the communicator wanted to convey. As a follow-up of this, it is also suggested that the receiver of the communication sends out an e-mail, detailing out the communication in specific terms and asking for a confirmation of the same. These two strategies along with the understanding that both the parties are part of the same organization and have common benevolent interest for the success of the project will go a long way in resting these conflicts and communication issues.
Ultimately, any organizational or interpersonal conflict whose focus is upon the advantages of better substitutes as their solutions and which uphold the respect and reverence for the other parties involved in the conflict would surely arrive at a solution that is better than what was originally decided as being the optimal solution by either of the parties involved in the conflict.
References
Nemmers, J. (2013, September 26). The Conflict Between IT and Business: 5 Steps to a Solution. Retrieved April 07, 2016, from CloudBolt: http://get.cloudbolt.io/blog/bid/338309/The-Conflict-Between-IT-and-Business-5-Steps-to-a-Solution
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