Database Reference
In-Depth Information
11.5.2 What They Should Provide You
The primary deliverable from your consulting partner is an Essbase system that works
to your company's specifications. It is easy to make that statement, but quite a bit harder
to actually deliver on it. Fear not, there are a series of basic project management tasks
and documents that will define your company's needs, exactly what is expected of all of
the project participants, and when, how, and by who project components are delivered.
your partner is responsible for and, therefore, should provide you with the following
artifacts:
• Statement of Work
• Project Plan
• Design Documents
• System Documents
• training Plan and Documents
• Status reports
Though partners can provide the following documents, its best that you take the lead
and they assist you with creating or refining the:
• Project Charter (discussed later in the chapter)
• requirements Document
11.5.2.1 Statement of Work (SOW)
The first document a consulting company must pro-
duce is a SoW that describes at a high level the what, how, and when of the Essbase proj-
ect. The SoW is also the consulting company's proposal in response to your company's
rFP and, in addition, a SoW often stands in as the contract and, thus, is the control-
ling document for all disputes. If you do accept a consulting company's bid, carefully
review the SoW to ensure that it is satisfactory or negotiate necessary changes before it
is signed.
While the SoW is a high-level document, the project plan is the mechanism that
maps the SoW's milestones and deliverables against specific tasks and resources. Who
manages the plan is dependent on the particulars of your organization and the project,
but unless the consultants are there as staff augmentation, they are the practice experts
and they should produce a plan. There are several common project planning pitfalls that
are to be avoided to deliver Essbase on time while meeting budget. no one purposely
creates a plan doomed to fail, but circumstances and resource pressure can make good
plans go bad quickly. The following are points to consider in the development and man-
agement of the project plan:
1. Do not overload resources to make the plan hit a deadline. If a task takes 40
hours, is scheduled over 5 calendar days, and for internal reasons you need it
to happen in 2 calendar days, making a resource work 20 hours per day is not
a practical way to meet the date. Allocate additional resources to the task or
reschedule the start dates to meet the date.
2. The consulting company will have a template plan that will typically be modi-
fied to suit your project. As that modification occurs, there may be conflicts
between the efforts required to complete the tasks as defined in the SoW with
the resources available. upon examination, if a task truly does take longer than
anticipated, pretending that it will not just means that the plan has an even more
tenuous relationship with reality than plans usually do. Both the consulting
