Project Management - Case Study 1

The Client Need: Transforming multiple general ledger approaches into a single national system

A federal agency required massive amounts of accounting data to perform its mission on behalf of the citizens it serves. The agency worked with multiple contractors, all of whom had their own general ledger systems. Complicating matters was that the overall system had been designed to accommodate only a certain amount of transaction numbers, all of which were expected to be exhausted within the next several years.

The feds decided that deploying a single general ledger system would achieve economies through standardization, create sufficient headroom, and provide more insight into all aspects of operations. They mandated that all the contractors migrate to the new system on a very tight timetable.

Beyond the time and scope pressures, the project involved extraordinary complexity. In addition to all the internal staff and subcontractors located throughout the U.S., it required the cooperation of the company that was maintaining the legacy system, as well as two massive IT vendors. After preliminary efforts for one of the major contractors stumbled due in large part to poor communication, we were brought in to turn that part of the project around and manage its completion. Contract issues between the contractor and one of the IT vendors consumed six weeks of the original timetable, compounding the inherent risk.

We believed the most effective approach would be virtual teaming, linking key staff in multiple offices and organizations online, rather than transporting them to a central location. When the contractor expressed reservations about the approach, we developed a two-day simulation to demonstrate to both management and the eventual participants how the process would work. The simulation was a resounding success, and everyone involved embraced the concept.

We also recognized that not everyone was fully cognizant of the project's vision, so we communicated that vision and the role everyone's part of the project played. In addition, we became an interface between the three vendors, ensuring that we could clean up and migrate data to the new system.

Our responsibilities expanded to cover three transitions over an 18-month period. By the third, we had set new records for project completion for all of the agency's contractors. Executives at the agency called it the "smoothest transition they had ever experienced," and were so impressed with the efficiency of our approach that they presented it to the other contractors as a model.