Case Study 6 - Project Rescue

Sector: Health
Client Type: Health Authority

Challenge/Opportunity

The organisation had embarked upon a national budgeting and forecasting software rollout. It had proved more complex than originally expected. The budget deadline was approaching and the system was not ready.  It was being used in Beta form but experiencing many issues.

The Project Sponsor didn't know the cause of the problem or what to do about it but had recognised a number of symptoms of a failing project:

• unhappy stakeholders

• missed deadlines

• no obvious structure to the project approach

• no regular project reporting

• assurances from the project lead that did not match user experience

Value Delivered

The key value delivered was:

• Allowing staff to do their work without ever-changing software

• The rapid resolution of time-critical faults and stabilisation of buggy software

• Descoping work that could not be completed in time

• Delivering a stable product

Hague’s Approach

We redefined the scope, implemented structured project methodologies, logged and ensured the resolution of over 60 software faults, wrote and implemented a software testing plan, developed a user manual and training course, trained accountants as trainers, and wrote a deployment strategy. Key steps included:

• Taking charge of the situation

• Freezing all development on the live system and creating a separate test instance

• Rapid analysis of the project based on observation, testing, documentation review, interviews with users and key stakeholders and extensive review of data

• Taking control of the test and release process

• Putting a structured, milestone-based approach in place with scheduled release dates

• Creating user documentation and training users 

Outcome/Result

Rolled out the application nationally across the organisation