The Mammoth Goes Live Today!

Visit tesco.com/tescobooks and you will see an ordinary site in fact ugly looking with many issues which will frustrate you as a user. You will not see a navigation on most of the pages and once you go to some areas of the site the only way to come back will be using a browser back button! the big images will hurt your eyes and login accounts that worked before will suddenly disappear! And the books that were available yesterday might not be there today!

Keeping aside the user experience (which I hope will be fixed in a few months to come) this is the single most biggest successful implementation in the world. Except the warehouse every thing is brand new for the books department. A full stack of 20+ systems went live on a single day. It is every programme managers nightmare and a good amount of people have lost their jobs! But it is finally out! There is not much you will see from a users point of view, but be patient and let it breath and grow. Its a platform which will allow Tesco to react faster to the market, and bring a lot more new things to the user in the future. 

A big congratulations to the full team working on it, some have been working on it for more than 2.5 years! This is surely a reason to celebrate.

-v

Cost and Time Over Runs

There are so many reasons that cause cost over runs in projects. Over the next few blogs will be detailing some points that can be taken care of specially in large projects. 

A large majority of projects go into cost and time overrun because of the skills of the people working on it. It is easy to catch that a vendor promised something in X million and Y months but was unable to deliver because they could not finish the development in time. It is however very difficult to assess and keep track of time eaten up by BAs and Test teams and Project manager disturbing the development team and eating their time and adding to the cost.   

For example I hire a resource to take care of the requirements from the business point of view and he keeps on calling the development team for 4-5 hours in a day asking questions which will enable him/her to understand the project very well but adds no direct value to the project. It is required; but not estimated in the estimates of the development team. Such situations arise very frequently in long running projects because of people movement.  depending on the size of the project and responsibilities of the new joiner.

This cost is different than the ramp up cost. In ramp up we assume that the cost of the new joiner not being productive for 5 - 10 days. But we take into account the cost and time spent by existing team in bringing him up to speed. This cost rises significantly of the new joiner is new to technology as well as domain along with the project. I don't have a rule of thumb yet to give a percentage you can add to the original cost when a team member is changed midway or a team is built with fresher BAs. I have been stung by this in the past 3 projects and I plan to introduce a post ramp assessment process which will give some indications of what can be expected from the person.  This also stress and confirms the fact that a knowledge management plan should be part of the overall project plan. A point to note though, knowledge management plan will reduce the cost but will not eliminate it.   

-v