Last week was a vacation week. Got back to my desk yesterday and spent most of the day cleaning up loose ends. Today we’re resurrecting the CRM upgrade, as it looks like we’re not going with a vendor implementation after all.
Mindy, who’s out of the office today, left me a note requesting a copy of the last version of the upgrade’s project charter. I forwarded that, and attached a message I wrote in August describing the shortcomings of the document. The charter is 18 months old and has become obsolete for a number of predictable reasons–in particular, part of the work’s done, and some of it’s no longer relevant because of organizational changes. Some of the context has changed, too, and with it we’ll need to reconsider what needs emphasis. I expect we’ll meet before the week ends to rework the doc. Meantime, I’m trying to remember what I used to know about being a Siebel system administrator. Over the next couple days I’ll be touching bases with key players and getting things running to my satisfaction. I expect that process to include bringing in the vendor’s technical support guy, who works out of Cleveland.
With any luck I’ll have Mindy–my customer on this project, and the PM on the larger effort–a realistic implementation timeline by Friday.
This project’s way too dependent on my availability, by the way. This will be the fourth time we’ve “launched” this project, and the fifth time I’ve started work on it; each time I got torn away to work on something more pressing, and the project went to sleep. It’s nice to be a key person, but depending on “indispensible people” is not good design.
The web project I’ve been working on? We’ve passed all that to Margie. I’m fairly comfortable with that. If she needs my advice, or even a few hours of my time, I’m just across the aisle….