How To Have A Successful Multi-Year Management Project

Transcription

1 May 201 Tips for a Successful MDM Implementation By:Ashraf Mohammed June 2012

2 Tips for a Successful MDM Implementation: In my last white paper, I talked about what causes an MDM project to fail. In this one, I talk about the MDM Project Lifecycle and provide tips and strategies to ensure that your MDM implementation is successful. The MDM Delivery Lifecycle: MDM projects can be broadly broken down into 5 stages: 1.Assessment and Requirement Gathering 2.Solution Outline 3.Design 4.Build and 5.Go Live Each of these stages are comprised of specific tasks, exercises and missions. Seen below is a simple diagram representing the different stages in the MDM Delivery lifecycle. It is important to remember that MDM is not a pure IT project. In order to have a successful MDM implementation it is absolutely critical for both business and IT to be actively engaged in every stage. Business processes, their sources, processes impacted in transit and the destination need to be accurately mapped and identified. This is not possible without the joint effort of both business and it. MDM Delivery Lifecycle 1

3 Strategize Strategize Strategize There are three key ingredients for any successful MDM Strategy. They are as follows. Enterprises need to adopt a : (1.) Phased, component by component approach (2.) Ensure the active Involvement of Business-users (3.) Establish effective Communication between all parties involved. I talk more about these indispensable MDM strategy pieces below. 1. Phased approach: Dr. Greame Edward s famous quote, It s not about the plan, it s all about the planning holds 100% true when it comes to MDM. The key to successful MDM implementation is for an enterprise to strategize their MDM implementation and break down the long term MDM vision into smaller, easily achievable and measurable pieces. Experienced MDM implementation partners who have been in the trenches, yet managed to successfully deliver workable MDM solutions need to be engaged. Business must ensure they understand the complete picture and command the visibility needed to set adequate milestones, review and measure MDM progress. 2. Involvement of Business: To ensure successful MDM implementation, it is critical for the MDM stake-holders to have the commitment from and informed input of business. At least 10-20% business input is absolutely required during the initial JAD sessions, when MDM requirements affecting the various business domains are being gathered. 3. Clear Communication: Successful MDM requires that free and effective communication is established across the board this must include the various stake holders, executives, business users, PMO and IT. Progress made and the roles and responsibilities of each individual must be communicated clearly. During the initial stages of an MDM project, there is usually sufficient communication via Town hall meetings, forums and weekly status meetings. But eventually, communication dies down. This is especially true when the project encounters bottlenecks and hurdles. One must not fail to remember that it is during tough times that more frequent communication in needed in order to ensure success. 2

4 Some MDM DONT S: When things are not going so good If the MDM project is not heading where you intended for it to go, don t panic, this will only affect your decision making skills. The most likely reason the project is going through this phase is that the scope is not being managed properly. Ensure you can re-scope in such a way that you can still successfully deliver a small, yet absolutely needed subset. Once that is achieved, deliver a complete set. This is a great approach, especially when the steering committee needs to see an early win. Don t have too many projects that depend on the MDM timeline. This is a very common stumbling block in MDM projects, especially because of the foundational nature of master data. At the beginning of the project, one may be inclined to allow these dependencies because it lends a level of importance and prominence to the MDM project. But remember, when tough times set in, either for the MDM project itself, or the other dependent projects, the tendency is to find fault with MDM. MDM is the easy target since it provides the foundation upon which the others depend. However, if you are left with no other option, except to peg other projects to depend on the MDM timeline, in the very beginning of the project, upfront, identify an exit strategy and a backup plan for each dependent project. In the event you are unable to deliver MDM on time you will still have a safety net in place. Ensure you discuss and review this backup plan upfront. Maintain a clear log. The moment you face, or suspect you are going to face a delay, execute the backup plan. This will ensure you are in control of the situation even when things do not go as planned with the MDM implementation. Tips for success from an MDM veteran Decision logs Of course one cannot maintain a log of every sent, or remember every word that is said during meetings. Therefore it is critical to include as part of the MDM team a scribe, to ensure that all key details pertaining to the available options, existing constraints and decisions made, are properly documented and captured. These logs must be reviewed and steps must be taken to ensure that the decisions made based on these logs are followed through. Maintaining a comprehensive decision log is a very crucial piece in project management and enterprise architecture. It is very possible that in a given situation, you may not have opted for the best available architecture, but, you may have still made the right architectural decision based on practicality, constraints involved etc. Therefore, these decisions, bottlenecks and choices need to be clearly documented. Such logs are invaluable when attempting to explain the approach and its justification, to the business users, IT, stakeholders and IT auditors. 3

5 Design and document A commonly ignored task in MDM is the documentation of the design and decisions. Business users and IT dislike documentation as if it were a tooth extraction. It is considered to be a waste of time, although the exact opposite is true. Nevertheless, in order to ensure it gets done, one needs to mentor the MDM team and educate them on the usefulness of documenting. Many of them are quite surprised, when they realize how documenting solution design can save them many, many hours of time which would have otherwise been spent attending long meetings and discussions. It is also used to bring team members up to speed, and provides the base required to improve and tweak design. Without documentation, the project goes into an all talk mode where nothing is in writing and hence cannot be measured for success or otherwise. When a design document is in place, it ensures that the IT team knows precisely what needs to be done. They are able to clearly visualize the MDM plan. This allows them to - buy in, recommend or question the design - which are all good. On the other hand, when the long term MDM vision and solutions design is not documented it makes the short term MDM goals ambiguous and unclear. When documentation of the proposed design is omitted, it easily gives room for finger pointing in the event of a glitch in the project. This type of fingerpointing can potentially derail the entire project. To avoid this, one should emphasize on design and documentation right from the beginning of the MDM project. If you take something then replace it with something better If you plan on removing functionality, then ensure you replace it with something better. As part of process refinement procedures, I have seen the process team suggest, design and even convince business users that they do not need a particular function, without first performing a complete study on how it is used. This leads to a situation where business users do not fully realize what they are signing up for. When business finally realizes that a key functionality is lost, there is an upheaval that the consequences were not communicated clearly. To avoid such a situation, ensure a comprehensive approach is followed with proper communication. And as a rule of thumb if you decide to remove a particular functionality-ensure you replace it with something better. Most often, improvements needed are not just in IT, but also include business process, organization management, impact analysis and change management. Don t shake the boat One of the approaches which I have found very effective in successful MDM projects is to not dictate my own terms and expect tasks to be achieved my way, but instead, to allow team members to work within their own comfort zone - as long as they are getting the job done. Ensure you recognize the efforts of your high caliber staff - a pat on the back, a hand-shake, a hi-five or a special mention during a weekly meeting all go a long way in fostering positive team spirit. Giving the key team members the 4

6 right decision making power also ensures that they are able to fulfill their responsibility. Set clear expectations for each role. Trust your team, but, keep in place efficient check points to verify progress and status without making them feel crowded. Show utmost patient when dealing with your workforce. Making hasty fire-hire decisions could potentially jeopardize the entire project. Ensure you have emergency funds available, to allow you to retain high-performing members in the project. Don t buy into comments like no one is indispensable - there are certainly key persons who are capable of ensuring the success of a project. Identify these key team members, appreciate them and maintain a positive working environment. Making drastic and abrupt HR moves will have an undesired outcome on the MDM project. Vendor selection An MDM application needs a sound architecture that is flexible, scalable, robust and extendable. The theory that project implementations need to be 80% out of the box with 20% customization, are the norm in CRM and ERP projects, but do not hold good for MDM projects. One has to remember that MDM is at the foundation of your enterprise data, and how your enterprise conducts business. It is possible that in MDM, a particular vendor application is not the right choice for you; it is also possible that the right choice for your enterprise may require more than 50% customization, although the vendor may claim that his MDM application requires only 20% customization. But the reality is, when the rubber hits the road, once the project requirements are thoroughly analyzed, the project management team often concludes that the application requires more than 50% customization! This is not anticipated by the implementation team, since the vendor never communicated this to the customer during sales. Vendor sales teams provide very unrealistic timelines for implementation. This causes anguish among the teams involved, the vendor is blamed, and the vendor in turn reacts by not responding. This is a situation often seen in MDM projects. This situation needs to be avoided in the first place. This can be achieved quite easily do not believe all that is said during a vendor sales pitch, instead prepare for the untold, remember the devil is in the details. Enforce due diligence in sizing the scope, include a GAP analysis before actual vendor-selection; perform GAP analysis after the requirements are gathered to ensure the vendor selection is correct. With MDM, a tailor-made, customized application, configured to suit the unique processes of each enterprise is what is ideal. Although you may hear that achieving this is expensive and time consuming, remember configuring a boxed, vendor application, itself is impossible without paying exorbitant License fees and then waiting for releases and patch work fixes, which is a very prolonged and expensive process. Picking the wrong MDM vendor will substantially increase the implementation life cycle and costs. To help you choose the right MDM product, be sure to invest in employing a very experienced and knowledgeable MDM specialist, who has experience using multiple MDM applications and has no affiliation to any one particular vendor, to guide you in your decision. This will certainly turn out to be time and money well spent. 5

7 Early warning indicators To ensure that your MDM project is successful, it is very important for the MDM Project manager to watch out for early warning signs of impending trouble - such as extra hours billed by the tech team, work products that are not verifiable, poor communication, lack of leadership/ ownership, scope creep, frequent clashes between team members, escalations, uncoordinated offshore/onsite activities, lacking risk management, delays in executing change management procedures and so forth. Once any or all these warning signs are evident, steps need to be taken promptly to fix them. If timely remedies are not performed, it could jeopardize the entire MDM project. In this paper, based on my years working on MDM implementations, I shared some tips to help achieve a successful MDM implementation. In my next paper I will discuss Best Practices in MDM Architecture and Reference Architecture. About the Author Ashraf Mohammed is a TOGAF and IBM Master Certified Information Architect specializing in MDM Master Data Management. Ashraf has worked at reputed IT names like IBM, Oracle and Siebel in delivering MDM projects across industry verticals such as agro-chemicals, finance, telecom, multi-media, publishing, e-government, retail, O&G and so forth. MDM is a complex and challenging concept, which when understood correctly and implemented accurately can produce phenomenal benefits to businesses. As an MDM specialist, he has seen firsthand, the glaring deficiencies in existing MDM solutions, faulty strategy and surprisingly common, yet, avoidable MDM pitfalls. Ashraf has designed and developed iclassic MDM, an end to end MDM solution - specifically designed to solve the complex data challenges faced by enterprises, in today s age of the internet, mobile computing, social networking and cloud applications. iclassic MDM has consciously eliminates many limitations seen in current MDM solutions. iclassic MDM is an agile, cloud based, flexible, highly configurable, end-to end MDM solution seamlessly built using the latest and greatest in technology and Information Architecture. See To leave your questions, comments or enquiries please write to ashraf@etsondemand.com 6