Common stories. Results-driven solutions. Contact FTS.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease – it’s a nice saying, but not a way to run an operation, especially one where we need governance that aligns with our growth plans. We need to architect an operational governance process that considers all business partners equitably in our service offerings and in our project vetting process.”

“Once projects are approved and scheduled, we are not skilled at following a prescribed, consistent, enterprise-wide, uniform process for executing them (e.g., SDLC) or reporting status to management in a way that provides visibility to all impacted stakeholders. How do we change this?”

“We have approved a multi-year, multi-million dollar technology initiative that spans a myriad of new and revised process enhancements, workflow impacts and technology and tool implementations. Each of these will have a discrete project manager, but who is the one, over-arching person we can look to for ensuring the success of all of these inter-related initiatives? Ah…we need a Program Manager.”

“Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. We thought we could tap one of our long-term internal business analysts to act as a pseudo-PM while doing the rest of his duties. Wow, was that a mistake we learned early and paid for dearly. We now realize the benefit of having a seasoned Project Management Professional (PMP) who directed us through our implementation using PMI (Project Management Institute) leading practices.”

“Most implementation partners slam in a solution according to “best practices” without providing enough time to first consider future state reporting, and what we need to do to our conversion data to enable our reporting needs. Our aggressive timeline puts at risk our ability to take the necessary time to clean our conversion data before loading it into the target system for testing alongside new data. We don’t want the result to be garbage-in, garbage-out.”

“We spent so much energy and time on this project. Why does it seem like it failed? ….We underestimated the value of effective training, communication and change management. They’re not just political sound bites – they really do make a difference if planned and executed properly. Remember, bad news travels fast, especially if training is poorly delivered, or if communication is not planned properly. Training and change management are typically assigned the least attention and are items that have the most potential for driving success or failure on a project. We have learned this lesson the hard way.”