Business Tools Blog

On November 1st, the Bear wrote about a Hectic Week at Zayo Bandwidth.  ←That’s ONE way to describe it.  I would have described the project as - we just ripped off the BAND-AID.   (It hurt like hell, but it’s over.)

What the Bear didn’t tell you in his blog is how we almost didn’t get the BAND-AID off.  I think the story is worth telling, because it illustrates why it takes so long to get things accomplished.  It’s why good intentions can sabotage quick results.  It’s why sometimes; you just have to trust that once the BAND-AID is off, life will be better.

Monday - Project Hatched.   The Bear had a long flight back from Europe and used it to conceptualize a plan to have a simple but accurate Install Pipeline report by the end of the week.  The Bear is always patient like that … he figured that since we’d been working on getting a solution done for 12 months,  5 days was a reasonable interval to plan and launch a fully functional new solution.

To his credit the solution was simple.  Use Salesforce.com for more than just sales - since all completed sales are already in Salesforce.com, it is a natural extension to continue using Salesforce to track the completed sale through installation.  Therefore, any completed sales that have not been installed would equal the Install Pipeline.

After discussing the plan with John Scarano, Zayo Bandwidth’s President, we decided that it could be done quickly.  There was one HUGE HAIRY complication - it was the last week of the month.  (In Telecom, the last week of the month is when 90% of orders are sold and installed).  No one would have time to work on this until next week.  Since I work in Zayo Group, I thought, this really isn’t that hard, and I volunteered to get it done with minimal intrusion to the business.  The scope that John, Dan and I defined was simple:

• Make sure that the process to update orders is not labor intensive for Service Delivery
• Identify all the October completed Installs in Salesforce.com and put them in Stage 8 - “Installed”
• Identify all orders in Salesforce.com that are still pending and put them in Stage 7 - “Pipeline”

Here’s how the week went:

Tuesday - Phase 1 System Work and Report Prototypes Complete.   With Eileen Arcilla’s - Zayo Bandwidth’s Salesforce.com expert - help, we had all of the Salesforce.com changes made by close of business on Tuesday.  The Bear reviewed preliminary reports and was happy that we were making progress so quickly.

Wednesday - Heavy Lifting - On Wednesday morning, I set out to map the data.  I thought this would be a 1-2 hour exercise.  I was wrong, and by noon I had lost all hope.  The theories I had about easily matching data from one system to the next were WRONG.  Fortunately,  Jason Lohmiller - Zayo Bandwidth Sales Ops - came to the rescue.  We manually mapped every opportunity to an order and identified a few sales processes that needed to be fixed along the way.  By Wednesday night, we were exhausted, but done.  I sent an upload file to Eileen Arcilla and was ready to review and refine the reports in the morning.

Thursday - Disaster - I thought the painful part of ripping off the BAND-AID was over on Wednesday.  But on Thursday morning, I took my eye off the ball and worked on our Monthly Financial reports for a few hours.  At about 1pm, I went into Saleforce.com expecting all of the data to be populated and the reports to be working.  To my horror, everything that had been complete was gone and the data upload hadn’t happened.

I called Eileen to find out what had gone wrong.  Here’s what I learned.  On Thursday morning, there was a meeting where additional stakeholders added good requirements to the project.  In order to meet these requirements, everything had to be done differently and this was going to take a few days to code.

Translate - The stakeholders put the BAND-AID back on

I think I might have been hysterical.  Poor Eileen had to listen to me.  She reasoned that all of the additional requirements were good.  Everyone had agreed.  I wasn’t in the mood to be reasoned with.

Fortunately, Eileen is very good, and by the end of the day on Thursday we had everything working with the original requirements back in place. She even loaded the data.

Friday - Testing and Punch Lists - the Pipeline reports were reviewed.  The Bear had a few tweaks and Eileen made all of the changes in record time.   We shared the reports with the stakeholders and everyone agreed that the first pass was 90% of what we needed and that we would address any other requirements later.

Saturday - The Bear blogs our solution to the world.

I learned two lessons.

• Don’t take your eye off the ball, even for a few hours.

• Insist on very simple Phase 1 requirements, and don’t allow ANY scope creep.  If we had taken the time to vet everyone’s concerns and requirements, rolling this solution out would have taken a month or more.  And even more alarming, to meet everyone’s requirements, would have meant compromising the original requirements.

Fortunately, this BAND-AID is off and the wound is healing nicely.  We have another project this week that will give us a Disconnect Pipeline by Friday.  Keep your fingers crossed!