The Phoenix Project 1 to 9 (Sarah is the SVP of Retail Operations)

Chapter 1,2,3 Characters Steve (CEO) Sarah is the SVP of Retail Operations Company: Parts unlimited, an automotive parts supplier Bill palmer : an IT operations guy Company is behind the competition trying to maintain competitiveness and reduce cost company laid off people 3 years ago Bill is now VP of IT operations, but he doesn’t want the position Company needs to regain profitability: need to increase market share and average order sizes. Stock price is half what it was 3 years ago, retail competitors are crushing them. Objective of Project phoenix is to close the gap with competition Bill was chosen because of his work on a previous project and his qualities: cool headed, pragmatic, dependable and says what he thinks. IT should focus on phoenix, and IT system to be reliable and available for the business. Problem with the payroll brought up by VP Finance. The payroll data that is uploaded on the system is erroneous. Wages can’t be late or else the union will step in. One option is to pay everyone even if the amount is incorrect and adjust it the month after. But, consequence is a financial reporting error. Bill meets with Patty and Wes who are now working for him. The IT department is working on a SAN issue but Bill doesn’t think the problem comes from there. To work on the payroll problem, they had to pull off Brent from the Phoenix project. Bill finds out that the payroll problem comes from the security department that installed a software to tokenize SSN numbers in a hurry. This deployment was supposed to be done long time ago but management never got around to it. Patty says that John (Chief info security officer) never goes through the change process or any one else in the company. She says they need more process and support from the top because people just change things without telling anyone. CHAPT 4 An emergency meeting is requested to discuss the enormous delay of the Phoenix project. There is a strong fight between Sarah and Bill, the latter accused of being the cause of the delay of the company's most important project because it is not able to do its job properly, not including priorities. Sarah's lack of respect and lack of esteem for Bill is revealed. During the meeting, therefore, it is pushed so that it will give only priority to the Phoenix project in how much must be maintained the date of exit on the market of the product that had been established from the beginning. Sarah advances this claim to Steven even if Bill argued that: a. We do not yet know what equipment we need to achieve the performance goals b. We did not test capacity to confirm our hypotheses With these premises, it would seem premature to proceed, but despite this we opt for the obligation to launch the project within 7 days of the meeting. Subsequently, in addition to the intra-departmental contrasts manifested during the meeting, inter-departmental conflicts also appeared. Bill realizes that even his employees unknowingly contrast it. CHAPT 5 An inter-departmental meeting is requested by Bill in order to discuss with his colleagues what happened during the general meeting held shortly before. All present this time, as mandatory. Discovered countless problems in terms of security control in the department. Bill finds out how much his department is too dependent on external resources, like Bert. Furthermore, at the request of Bill, we try to understand how to manage production, discovering the demand, priorities, the status of work in progress and the availability of resources. Bill asks Patty for help and tells him that they have all the calls that come into the service desk, whether it's asking for something new or asking for something to be fixed. But even that list will be incomplete, because so many people simply go to their favorite IT person to ask for advice and all that work is completely out of the books CHAPT 6 The delay continues, again, on the Phoenix project. The projects started by the department are calculated and the number exceeds 105, between small and medium-sized ones. Despite the huge number of projects, the department's resources are still largely moved to the Phoenix project. Therefore, there are problems of internal organization. The main problem of the company also manifests itself: The only coherent theme in the interviews was that everyone struggles to complete their project. Even when they have time, they struggle to give priority to all their commitments. People in the business constantly ask our staff to do things for them. Above all marketing. We continue to struggle to make a real change. An e-mail is sent informing everyone to send any change for the next week by Monday. Monday's changes will not have to be authorized, but will change for the rest of the week. No exception. This is to avoid killing enthusiasm because the best way to kill everyone's enthusiasm and support is to prevent them from doing what they have to do. Chapt 7 There’s a potential new board member ‘Erik’ who want to meet with Bill in addition to other executives to consider joining the board. Bill meets with him immediately. Erik has noticed that the situation of the company is not good. He points out that the company is having IT availability issues cause company executives to be splashed on the news, he adds that audit is also involved which means potentially more bad news for the company in addition to Phoenix. Bill mentions that he’s being whiplashed from one emergency to another. He says the company needs more people or get more efficient to get all the committed work done. Erik mentions that the problem is bigger: they don’t know what “work” is. They don’t see how work is committed to the organization and if they can’t see it, let alone manage it or organize it and sequence it. Erik takes Bill to one of the manufacturing plant and shows him all the WIP “work in progress” (inventory), Erik says it’s the cause for due-date problems. The jobs to perform are not picked correctly. They should be picked on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume work NOT on the availability of the first station. Bill’s job as VP IT is to ensure the uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work. Erik mentions there are 4 different types of work. Chap 8 Bill has a meeting with Steven to discuss the needs to complete all the projects. Bill says they are understaffed and they have too many projects competing for their attention. Phoenix and the compliance project (audit) are competing for resources like Brent, they can’t be focused on both. BUT Steven doesn’t want to hear anything and insists that they should be able to do everything. He refuses to hire more people because of budget constraints. Bill then has a change meeting with Patty and Wes, there have been 437 changes submitted this week, they are trying to come up with a way to process them and focus on the riskiest changes. Patty wants to create a standard procedure around the changes Chap 9: Bill is in a budget meeting but he gets an emergency mail. The credit card processing system is down which impacted all stores. Bill leaves the meeting and gets to the other meeting. They are trying to figure out which change caused the problem. The engineers keep shifting blame on each other. Brent finally solves the problem. But Bill is not satisfied with how the meeting went so he tells Patty to have a process for the meetings like this. On Friday, there’s a change meeting that actually everyone attends. They prioritize changes trying not to put a lot on the same day that Phoenix is deployed and the meeting goes well. Bill realized what 3 of the 4 types of work Erik was talking about are: Business projects, internal IT projects and changes.