Lessons learned: 15 months on an SAP project

As I write this, I'm in the final week before we go-live on an SAP project that has been in the works for 2+ years - but I've been apart of it for 15 months. There are 2 major things that stick out to me as "lessons learned" as part of that 15 months.

The Whole Picture

I'm sure an SAP project is similar to other IT projects - there are several phases - gathering requirements, writing requirements, writing design papers, writing specs, developing, unit testing, integration testing, etc. The final step on our project was user acceptance testing - where we had the users come in and test the processes and give any feedback. It seems like it wasn't until this step did the full picture come into view.

So, what I've learned is that the sooner you can wrap your head around the whole picture the better. Details certainly matter - but you can't get too wrapped up in them. It's good to take a step back and ask "does this make sense?" I keep going back to a Stephen Covey quote "begin with the end in mind" which seems to fit even if it's not quite the same context as Covey was intending. Think about the end result, think about the overall flow of the process, think about the process from the customers point of view.

Which brings me to one other point - customer involvement is key. I don't think it matters much on how the customer is involved - just as long as they are. I can see how customer over-involvement might be a bad thing - but I'm thinking it might not be as bad as customer under-involvement. But get the customer involved, get their input on the overall process, take the feedback and make decisions.

Get it done

I've been seeing this in different areas of my life lately, but this project was a big one. Take responsibility, take the initiative and figure out how to get it done. Most things aren't hard to do, but it might take contacting someone else or asking the question or putting in the request - but the bottom-line is think about the necessary steps to complete the task at hand and then perform the actions.

It seems elementary - it really does - and it is. But, I've seen a lot lately, myself included, where we want babied. We want to send one IM to someone and have them not respond. We want someone to take pity on the fact that we tried one thing and it didn't work. But if we want results and we want real output, we have to get real things done. So send an email, make a phone call, talk to a manager - communicate the importance of the task and priority. Get things done.

Conclusion

I think both of those items seem a bit simple - but a) it's very easy to get wrapped up in the details of day-to-day tasks and b) it's very easy to try one thing and quit without thinking about all of the other possibilities to get the task done. So for me, these are definite lessons learned from this project that I can apply to both work and personal life.