Topic: Discovering Your IS Project: Managing for Success

Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Registration:
Please note that all registrations must be pre-paid on-line and no walk-ins will be accepted the day of the event. The Registration deadline is Sunday evening, February 11 at midnight. Seating is limited. Registration may close earlier if seating capacity is filled. Contact the Director - Registration for further discussion.

To Register

Location:
The Stonegate
2401 W. Higgins Rd.
Hoffman Estates , IL 60195
(847) 884-7000

Driving directions.

Speaker: Timothy Taylor, PMP, Sarah James Technical Consulting

Agenda:
6:00 Registration and Networking
6:30 Announcements
6:45 Dinner
7:45 Raffle
8:00 Presentation
9:00 Close

Abstract:
When considering IS projects, how do you define Success?

• “Our department has morphed from a profit center into a cost center!”
• “My employees have said they would rather have Bubonic Plague than use the new system.”
• “The default greeting at our Help Desk is, ‘The system is down, please try again later.’ ”

If you have heard compliments like these about your IS or ERP projects, then this session is a must before you tackle your next implementation or upgrade.

Why do ERP projects, or any software implementation for that matter, fail to meet user expectations? It’s not because the developers or the SMEs are incompetent, but because they are not asking the right questions so they can deliver the right solutions. Traditional fit/gaps don’t! - because they are looking at the trees and not seeing the forest. Simply put, they are asking the stakeholders the wrong questions. This session will demonstrate why this is a fair critique of the way many IS/ERP projects are currently conceived and executed. It will propose a new paradigm for discovering what a successful project means to your stakeholders and new tools for managing and controlling the project to complete the project within scope, budget, and schedule.

“Quality is first, always first!” You and your stakeholders deserve nothing less from your investment of time, resources, and money. This new paradigm, which sets out to ask the right questions and efficiently deliver the right answers, will, I believe:

• Guarantee a go-live strategy that objectively validates that your system is working and you can conduct all critical business functions on day one;
• Make users' lives easier, not harder; and,
• Leave behind a system that is stable, delivers above-par performance, and can be maintained by your permanent staff.

About the Speaker:
Like a good red wine, project management skills improve with time.

Capping a fourteen year career in the publishing industry both as an independent textbook project manager and publisher, Mr. Taylor has brought his keen observation skills to bear critically on a second, equally lengthy career as an Information Systems project developer, technical lead, and project manager on multiple PeopleSoft implementations and upgrades. Thus recognizing the difference between a successful, stable, and solidly performing implementation, and the useless train wrecks of the all-too-common hasty and ill-planned project, he has dared to challenge fundamental methodological assumptions about how to organize and manage a successful Information Systems, ERP project.

Successfully managing projects when project management was still more an art form than the scientific discipline formulated by PMI, his new paradigm, which is the focus of the presentation, is an amalgam of those insights and a leadership style that energizes a project team by respectful acknowledgement of the value of each stakeholder’s contribution. Each stakeholder is both customer and supplier of some aspect of the project and its product, meaning ownership and acceptance is directly proportional to participation.

Mr. Taylor, himself also a veteran of the gritty world and cacophony of steel fabrication, takes the concept of “product” in an IS context one step further. When viewed, as it is, as a manufactured product, albeit an intellectual one, IS projects are subject to the same dynamic, rules, and economy of the assembly line, where each program, object, or batch job is a precision component of a larger machine, your new Information System.

Registration:
Register using the link above. Please note that all registrations must be pre-paid on-line and no walk-ins will be accepted the day of the event. The Registration deadline is Sunday evening, February 11, at midnight. Seating is limited. Registration may close earlier if the seating capacity is filled. Contact the Director of Registration for further discussion.

Contact the Director of Programs at programs@pmi-chicagoland.org if you have any further questions or concerns regarding this event.