Know your Business Problem First

Disclaimer: I have been writing the blogs in the style of story telling based on some incidents with some fiction added to emphasize the message. Hence please do not conclude anything based on the blogs. The characters are fictitious and do not intend to any individuals

One day, I got an urgent call from my fellow leader Anil rathod that there is a serious escalation from the Customer and needed some help. I immediately went to his work place to understand the situation.

"Khaderao, I need as many technical people as possible from your team for the next 6-8 weeks. Please .. I cant fund them as the project is already overrun but I need your help"

I replied "I will try my best, but can I understand the issue and reason for escalation?"

"We need to load 4000 Sales order lines in to the Customer's ERP. They need this to be completed by this week or next"

"Oh, I heard this Cutomer went live recently. Why this escalation?"

"The customer went live 2 months ago. But they didnt enter any Sales orders and continued in their legacy system. Now they realized that they needed all these lines in ERP"

"If that is the case, why is the escalation?"

"Our team told that this can be done only in 4 weeks and asked for a Change request"

"Hmm"

"Customer says no one guided them and informed that Sales orders needed to be entered in ERP"

"Interesting. Once went live, all transactions must be in ERP unless there was a different plan"

"True. But he says no one informed them on the same"

"OK. Now what is the plan"

"I have a very meticulous plan and I am sure we can get there. But I need about 20-25 technical people to execute the plan"

"Why cant the customer wait for 4 weeks if thats what it takes?"

"One second. Let me check."

Anil called the Onsite Project Manager and after a couple of minutes, he said "the Customer needs these lines to be in the ERP before end of Financial Year to show the accounts receivables.... Otherwise his true budget will not be reflected and he will not get sufficient funds for next year"

"How much is the amount approximately"

Anil called his PM again.

"4.85 Billion Dollars"

"Oh." (Now I understand the business Problem)

"OK Anil, can we meet your team?"

On the way to his team working place, I called my technical people to reach there.

When I went there it was a great scene.

Sikhandi was talking to about 15 people.

"Pani, you take the first 100 lines, Veena take 101 to 200. Charles you 201 to 300..... And all of you will be working here till we are finished. I will arrange food and bed for all of you. Ibrahim, you need work with overlaps and keep updating the Onsite team..."

Sikhandi's face was glowing with excitement about the kind of meticulous plan he is going to execute.

In a span of 1 hour Customer made 2,3 calls to know what is the progress. Entire team is full of pressure . But Sikhandi is quite excited to do this.

In the mean time Sikhandi prepared a Dashboard to show how many lines are completed, in progress and yet to be migrated. He generated some charts as well to show the same report in colors and figures.

While Sikhandi's speech was going on, I went to the team lead kind of person and asked her to let me have a look at the list of lines to be migrated to ERP.

I asked her to sort the list in descending order of Line amounts. I generated a Pareto chart to check the lines that cover 80% of the revenue. It needed about 850 lines which are actually amounting to close to 4 Billions.

I waited till Sikhandi completed the speech.

"Anil, please take these 850 lines and distribute to the teams. Let this round be completed with full focus. and there cant be any errors or iterations and they all must work fine once migrated to ERP"

The team got the redistributed list. I told them to take the same time as planned earlier for 4000 lines but do the migration perfectly.

In the mean time customer made a few more calls. I kept the phone disconnected.

By evening the 850 lines were completed and tested.

I asked Sikhandi to provide the Update. Sikhandi was not happy. He however fed the report. Now the graphs show 850 lines completed with % of work completed and so on.

I tweaked a few things and modified the graphs to show how much revenue is covered instead of lines migrated.

Sikhandi was not happy. "We have been sending the progress in terms of lines. I prepared a great dashboard. Now you are sending something else"

I said "Sikhandi, I am not competing with you. For that matter no leader needs to compete with his own team. You are going to send this email with this progress. In the body of message please clearly mention that you covered 80% of the revenue amount to reflect in the ERP."

Sikhandi is a bit relieved. The email was sent. Anil called the customer and updated the same.

"Now you wont get any more calls from the Customer. Please continue the work and complete the rest of the lines in the order that is prepared by Sikhandi (???). "

"Also please ensure ! the Customer should now enter the sales only in ERP. No more lines in the Legacy system please.... "

***

This may conclude that

•  Understand the Problem Statement instead jumping to Solutions
• The key is to identify what is really impacting the stakeholder from the Problem
• Work for sufficient time to understand and plan the right task in place of jumping to tasks with no plan
• The Focus must be on the final outcome
• Every time lining up bunch of people may not work if the plan is missing