Introduction
Business leaders often have a vision of business capabilities and products that are far beyond the capabilities and constraints of their technology resources. In many organizations the business groups are continuously challenging the technology groups to improve and increase capabilities. If the existing technology has been enhanced to its practical limits then a large scale technology platform upgrade may be needed to support the business strategy over the long term.
It is common in industry for project managers (PMs) to under estimate the level of business involvement in large technology projects because the team and stakeholders are focused on the technology aspects. There are potentially large risks to shareholders and the vitality of the company if the technology upgrades are not well aligned to fully support the business requirements and business strategy. Therefore, it is critical to maintain a fully integrated team with experience and representation from all contributing areas of the company to ensure success. Teams may consist of member groups including; technology leaders, business leaders, stakeholders, end users, and customers.
This paper will discuss the challenges that a business organization faces when adapting to large technology changes and provides some tips and suggestions for PMs striving for business excellence through the transition period. Real-world examples will be provided from a Marriott eCommerce web platform upgrade project. The paper will discuss how a business team may contribute to the five Process Groups (Exhibit 1) and the nine Knowledge Areas (Exhibit 2) of a project as presented in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI, 2000). This information may help the audience achieve business excellence before, during, and after the technology upgrades.
Exhibit 1 – Project Management Process Groups (PMI, 2000). The business team at Marriott contributed to all of these processes on a platform migration technology project.
Exhibit 2 – Project Management Knowledge Areas (PMI, 2000). The business team at Marriott participated in all of the areas for a platform migration project.
Process Groups
Initiating Process Group
A project starts with the Initiating process group and the first project area applied is scope initiation. The business team plays a key role and is best positioned to provide all of the information inputs: product description, strategic plan, project selection criteria, and historical information. The tendency is to have the business get the project approved, provide the necessary funding and then hand over the project to technical management. The challenges are finding an even balance of business and technology perspectives and participation during the Initiation Process.
The contributions of the business team are best focused on capturing project information on the products and services that will be affected by the technology upgrade. The business knows how customers use the product, where the revenue centers are, the nuances of how products function, and defining product requirements. The project strategic plan is typically derived from corporate business strategy, growth forecasts, end user requirements, financial analysis, and long-term goals. The business often sets the project metrics, objectives, selection criteria, success factors, desired outcomes, business requirements, prioritization, and constraints and assumptions. The business team is typically well qualified to provide a historical perspective on: business performance, lessons learned, outstanding requirements that were never addressed in the past, organizational structure, and current business processes. All of this information forms the business basis for all project decisions. Therefore, it is essential that the business team provides this project information and that the technology team fully integrates the information into their planning, execution, controlling, and close out activities.
Planning Process Group
The Planning process draws on the largest number of knowledge areas including integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communications, risk, and procurement management. While these areas of planning will certainly include all of the required technical elements, this paper will focus on the business areas for each. The project integration area of Planning is plan development as it pertains to all relevant knowledge areas and process groups. The role of the business team is to ensure the plan is comprehensive and reasonably addresses the relevant business impacts to the stakeholders, partners, operations, and customers. In addition, it must be well aligned with the business drivers that originally justified the technology upgrades. The project time lines, cost, management processes, and external business factors are communicated and assessed to ensure project outcomes that minimize impacts to business operations before, during, and after the technology upgrades and cut-over.
The challenge is to ensure all business participation and transitioning activities are well defined and included in the project scope because they become vital to managing other knowledge areas such as mitigating risk, decomposition of requirements and tasks, building in quality, and avoiding cost overruns and schedule delays. It is typically safe to assume that there will be many business impacts at all levels of the organization as a result of large technology upgrades. Impacts to the business begin well before the technology cut-over. The project will begin to consume resources at all levels of the company which typically means tradeoffs that result in the delay, slow down, or even cancellation of other corporate initiatives. During cut-over there will likely be product freezes that result in few or no product improvements which may slow business growth, impact customers and partners, and limit the business ability to respond to changing conditions.
The lesson learned is that it is necessary to plan for all business impacts and activities and then adequately define the work required to efficiently transition to the new technology. For the Marriott platform upgrade, the business team either lead or was an active participant on the major scope tracks listed below. Within each track the primary business scope and work break down is presented. This list offers a good starting point for PMs in planning business activities for a Web platform technology project.
Track 1: Project Planning and Management
- Project management
- Program management
- Scope management
- Time management
- Cost management
- Risk management
- Communication management
- Quality management
- Human resource management
- Procurement management
- Change management
- Establishment of steering committee and advisory board
- Project sponsorship
- Project funding and business case development
- Requirements definition, methodology, and tools
- Business requirements definition
- Technology selection
- Vendor evaluation and selection
- Product definition for all web applications and sites
- Application functional requirements definition
Track 2: Content Management System
- Application analysis
- Application design
- Site inventory
- Display template design
- Application business logic
- Security standards and administration rules
- URL and domain definition and migration
- Search engine optimization
- Data validation rules
- Data modeling to support business and end user requirements
- Content strategy and content modeling
- Write copy
- Web site tracking and metrics
- Establishment of performance and technical benchmarks
- Graphic and photo library development
- Content conversion
Track 3: Quality Management
- Visual style guide standards
- Transactional form standards definition
- Glossary of terms
- User testing of CMS application
- Developing test scripts and scenarios
- User acceptance testing
- Visual quality control
- Function quality control
- Quality control of international Web sites
- Front-end interface coding standards
- Content bug fixes
- Prioritize severity of defects
Track 4: Partner Site Cut-Over
- Change management with affiliated partner sites
- Program HTML code for partner sites
- Coordinate cut-over activities with partners
- Mitigate partner and customer business impacts
- Plan technical enhancements with partners
- Market new capabilities
Track 5: Field Communications and External Site Cut-Over
- Identify impacts to hotel and field office Web sites
- Market technology benefits and improved business capabilities
- Communication strategy and delivery
- Assess external web traffic sources and dependencies
- Coordinate external site traffic cut-over changes
Track 6: Business Process Development
- Content publishing work flow development
- Content publishing business processes development
- Update 16 new and existing eCommerce business processes
- Process documentation
- Develop templates for standard deliverables
- Develop example deliverables
- Participate in stakeholder review and approval process
Track 7: Organizational Development
- Organizational impact assessment
- Organizational sizing and work load forecasting
- Revise or create new job descriptions
- Staffing and recruiting development
- Transition jobs
- Training development and coordination
- Deliver application and business training
- Communication planning and execution
- Managing stakeholders and customer impacts
Execution Process Group
The Execution Process encompasses the implementation and control of the full project plan by the integrated team. At Marriott, the business team assigned responsibilities for all business activities and deliverables defined in the scope definition above and also worked to support the technical team and project management. Business team activities may vary depending on the situation but will generally focus on: management and planning, sponsorship, business applications, business users, business partners, customer impacts, business processes, organizational impacts, and planning to capitalize on the upcoming technology enhancements. Challenges in project execution are that the business activities may only represent 10-25% of the entire project effort but it was the business drivers that initiated the project and must continue to guide project decision making and controls to ensure successful project outcomes.
The lessons learned from the Marriott project are to continually maintain high business participation on virtually all project activities, even on technical tracks. This will allow the business to keep the pulse on the project as well as prepare for the cut-over and beyond. Business participation is also key to ensuring expectations are met and that the business has the opportunity to take full advantage of project deliverables and outcomes. The business contributions will both speed up the project as well as provide much needed experience and training for the new organization by using the new tools and processes before cut-over. This allows for resolution of any issues and practice for operational excellence post-launch.
In the case of the Marriott platform upgrade, the eCommerce business team works side-by-side with technical teams and contractors to design, develop, and test the platform's technical and application architecture. Team development includes subject mater experts (SME) from the business for each web application, product, web site, or business capability, whereby the SME represents the perspective of business services, internal users, and customer requirements. Quality is built in by having integrated teams that ensure continuous knowledge transfer and representation of alternate perspectives on complex issues and decisions.
Procurement is a major element for the Marriott platform migration because of the complexity of the technology selected which includes: Java J2EE architecture, Websphere 5, Unix AIX operating system, DB2 database, and a Vignette V7 content management system and web portal. Marriott's existing technical capabilities and skills center on the current web platform consisting of a windows architecture, NT/IIS operating system, SQL database, home-grown content management tools, and static web pages. Procurement is critical to the Marriott project because of all of the new skills and capabilities that accompany the new platform architecture.
Procurement Management includes contractor and vendor services of all kinds, hardware and software, operating system, content management system, personalization portal, and strategic partner selection. The role of the business team includes participation in all procurement decision and vendor selections to ensure project success through beneficial and strategic partnerships. Be sure to allocate a realistic amount of time for Vendor interviews, development of evaluation tools and criteria, vendor selection, and negotiation and legal review of contracts and service level agreements. Vendors need to be compatible with our business model and help to defend against both company risk and competition. Contract administration is also fundamental to business interests for management of the cost structure, payment schedule, warranty period, accountability, and long-term partner relationships.
Controlling Process Group
The role of the business team in the project controlling processes is to focus on the business impacts of change to ensure priorities are established. Given the challenges of designing, building, testing, and launching a moving target, business development will likely halt for a period of time in order to freeze project scope and stabilize the products and code base included in the platform cut-over. Large technology projects tend to take priority for resources and may result in a disruption of business processes and transactions, service outages, or a freeze in new product releases. These impacts may start well before the project as the business decides to stop investing in the current platform and may extend years into the future as a back log of business initiatives build up over the period of frozen capabilities.
The lesson learned is that the business must take ownership of prioritizing and managing the change requests for all business initiatives and project impacts before, during, and after cut-over. The business team needs to continually manage expectations and perform tradeoff analysis between new business activities and their impact on project risk, quality, schedule, or cost of the technology upgrade and other company projects. Project change must be aligned with beneficial business outcomes to ensure project success. In many cases you must also assess the impacts on dependent projects as well. Too many change requests may impact previously approved change requests by over taxing the project team and change management process and may jeopardize the ability of the project to deliver on commitments.
Using controlling processes the PM can keep pace with the complexities and challenges associated with large technology changes and measure the pulse of human resources to keep the organization motivated, focused, and productive. Employees may experience anxiety and concern during a change period due to career uncertainty, changing roles and responsibilities, and organizational changes required to realign with the new systems, applications, services, workflows, and business processes. Project Managers must address individual team member concerns and questions and provide leadership and guidance for positive change. It is largely the PMs responsibility to keep the team excited, informed, and optimistic, as well as working closely with functional managers across the organization to implement the resulting organizational changes. The PM and functional managers can take advantage of the situation by offering team incentives through training opportunities, resume-building skills, new challenges, career growth and opportunity, and a sense of making a difference.
Closing Process Group
Project closing activities include formal acceptance of project deliverables and inspection to ensure that the comprehensive scope of work is complete. It also includes final cost accounting and communication to project stakeholders. The business team performs these functions for all of their project track activities listed in the Planning Process Group section of this paper. The business team also contributes to formal acceptance of technical deliverables that are to be utilized by end users such as User Acceptance Testing of web applications, web sites, business applications, and the content management system used in the Marriott platform migration. The business project managers provide final status and reporting on all of the tasks in the seven business tracks. Coordination and planning of formal acceptance by the business and technical teams may be challenging because of the preoccupation with cut-over activities. However, formal acceptance is needed to ensure all project deliverables produce what is required to support the planned business processes. In addition, formal acceptance is required for contract close out and other closing activities.
The closing phase of the Marriott platform migration also marks a major milestone in the eCommerce business development where the completed platform must be fully integrated into all relevant business process and operations post launch. There are a number of communications activities related to the roll-out and education of business users about the new processes and capabilities of the new technology. With new business applications such as a content management system there are significant training and user support activities needed to get users up to speed quickly. These activities are critical to user adoption of the new tools and processes and in turn ensures effective utilization of new capabilities post launch. These activities are imperative in achieving the overall business objective of a smooth transition over to operational excellence using the new systems and applications.
Business Excellence
The business drivers for most large technology upgrade projects are to expand the capabilities of the business to deliver on strategy, support growth, and adapt to changing market conditions, competitive threats, and evolving customer expectations. Therefore, it is critical to the success of the project that the business value of technology development is always first in mind and continuously reinforced among all team members, stakeholders, and at all levels and aspects of the project. Business excellence is also achieved by the technology and systems architecture that can offer improved speed to market, shortened development cycles, and streamlining operations and maintenance activities, provided they are defined project objectives and planned for in the project scope.
The challenges in achieving business excellence and alignment with business drivers on large technology projects are many. Often the technology and business units are in separate departments or divisions within a company and are not accountable to the same leadership authority, as is the case for Marriott. It is hard for the business to both focus on their own activities while maintaining oversight and participation in the technical team activities. In the case of the Marriott platform, a team from a contractor provided a significant portion of project resources and leadership which increased the complexity of reporting relationships and accountability. With limited corporate resources, inherent high costs, and significant challenges associated with large technology projects, it is difficult to maintain the priority on business excellence activities. All too often they are down-scoped, neglected, postponed, or under-funded, which can lead to diminished benefits, lost revenue, business interruptions, decreases in efficiency, or even project failure.
The key to business excellence begins with strong sponsorship and participation from business leaders. If the business team stays intimately involved in all project decisions and places a high value on business activities they can ensure success. The business must also possess the expertise and bring their own resources to deliver on the business activities. It is not realistic to expect the technical teams to provide this service to the project. At Marriott, the business team provided a 3-year eCommerce strategy that outlined desired capabilities that set the requirements to guide technology procurement and architecture decisions. The business also provided the best team available that possessed business expertise, project management skills, and who were technically savvy enabling the business to effectively plan, communicate, and collaborate, with the technical team. The business team was organized with numerous members on the following teams: advisory board, steering committee, program management, project management, project team, stakeholders, and subject mater experts.
Business process engineering was also used to create alignment with the Marriott platform by establishing a model for future business process and capabilities that provided the needed structure by which to plan project deliverables and make the envisioned capabilities a reality. In particular, the business outlined a vision for distributed authors of web content as well as business users having direct control over application business logic and personalization rules on web sites. The business leadership team spent the year prior to the platform migration capturing the requirements for future capabilities, securing funding, and preparing the business case for the project. The business also took ownership of existing and future business applications to fully support the project in any aspect needed to ensure success and alignment. The primary business applications on the Marriott project were the content management system and personalization engine for web sites. Business processes were created by identifying and reaching out to all relevant business units and developing ideal future state processes to assist with both product development as well as the planning and training required for implementation.
Organizational planning was performed to align the Marriott teams with the new platform to ensure both the business and technical units are properly staffed to support the new business processes, applications, and technical infrastructure. By working with the Human Resources Department and the functional managers, new positions were created where needed in the new organizational structure. These new positions provide opportunity for advancement, career growth, and optimism on the project. However, the organizational change must be managed carefully so as to mitigate any feelings of anxiety, displacement, or uncertainty that may be experienced by some associates. Adoption of new processes and tools was achieved by actively engaging the affected organizations and working directly with the functional managers to develop, manage, and implement the changes. Adoption was also facilitated with an emphasis on training, providing job aides, and documentation of future processes and job roles, and is expected to result in a smooth transition over to the new platform.
Conclusion
For the Marriott platform upgrade the project mantra is “operational excellence”. Leaders use the mantra to keep the project focused on the important goals and objectives that initiated the project to begin with. The mantra also helps to convey a sense of management commitment to the associates and team members that they are: valuable contributors, relevant stakeholders in the project, and have ownership and authority to implement necessary changes on the job. eCommerce has involved almost everyone in project activities including strategy, requirements, risk assessment and mitigation, Quality Assurance, subject mater experts, developing new workflows and business processes, training, educating customers and end users, and minimizing disruptions to business services. The four primary business contributions to the Marriott project include:
- Preplanning of requirements and future business capabilities
- Sponsorship, leadership, management, and funding
- Participation in the development of business applications
- Placing value on change management, process engineering, training, and organizational impacts required for a smooth cut-over
Everyone in the department and organization has a role on the platform project because when it is over, Marriott's $1 billion eCommerce enterprise and the majority of our business processes will be relying on a smooth transition and operational excellence after cut-over. The closing phase of a large technology project is actually a challenging new beginning where the business focuses on implementing their strategies and starts to leverage the new technology to achieve business growth and opportunity for their associates, customers, partners, stakeholders, and shareholders.
