What went well?

Project overall went very well. The product works as advertised and was deployed in an
extremely short period of time. Vendor was very responsive and worked closely with us to fulfill
their deliverables. This project was five weeks long from start to finish. This is our primary case
management application, and staff use it daily. We docket between 800 and 1,000 cases each
year and log all the data and documents in this application. Converting from our former system
(a combination of a Lotus Notes database and a custom front-end application displayed in a
browser) in such a short period of time was very aggressive and vendor was great to work with.

What didn’t go well or had unintended consequences?

Two issues that didn’t go as planned or caused frustrations were data migration and end user
training. Data migration was slower than expected due to the format of the data and the fact we
were importing from a workstation rather than a server. We had a large volume of data and
documents to import and only a few days scheduled to do so, which necessitated putting in
extra hours.

End user training provided by vendor was done on two separate dates, but a fair number of staff
could not attend either day. Finishing touches were being put on project till the very end, which
meant some processes changed between training and deployment. Detailed documentation was
created and provided to staff on the launch date which helped smooth the transition, but if we
had more time we could have done additional training to help staff feel more prepared.

If you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently?

Having a longer timeline to complete the project would have helped everyone involved, but
given the circumstances I don’t know that there was much that could have been improved upon.

What recommendations would you make to others doing similar projects?

Very important to transform your business practices before pursuing a change in technology.
The changes to our processes that resulted from our LEAN review meetings was invaluable to
determine how our data was processed and how it could be improved. If we didn’t have those
changes in mind I think we would have largely tried to recreate our old case management
system and been frustrated with the results.
Schedule

From your perspective:

Did the project remain on schedule?

Set soft deadline of twenty days before end of fiscal year. Went one week over
schedule, but finished well before the hard deadline of June 30th.

What helped the project remain on schedule?

Had very well managed deadlines for each section and stuck to them. Met each of those
deadlines, the extra week was spent making changes per our feedback and finalizing
some pieces that had bugs show up in testing.

What prevented the project from remaining on schedule?

Very aggressive timeline. Didn’t allow enough time for feedback and changes after users
were introduced to the system, and important changes/small bugs were too
overwhelming to fix in the one week allotted, stretching the go live date by an extra
week.

What strategies were used to help the project stay on schedule?

Had daily communication with vendor as well as weekly check-ins about progress
related to expectation.

Costs

From your perspective:

It was completed on a fixed budget

Did the project remain within predicted budget?

N/A

If the project came in under budget, how were savings made?

N/A

If the project ran over budget, why did this happen?

N/A
Goals & Objectives

From your perspective:

What were the major goals & objectives of this project?

Goal was to move from a 14 year old case management system that was unable to
operate on a new server, to a new case management system that better served our
process changes and would promote future innovations.

Did the project deliverables align with these goals and objectives?

Yes. Had in-person planning meetings with development team to explain our business
and processes. Had users responsible for different processes join meetings and give
input to development team. Helped development team clearly state deliverables and
fulfill them.

Did project outcomes help meet the goals and objectives?

It did.

If not, why did the project vary from the objectives?

Requirements & Functionality

From your perspective:

Was the functionality promised as part of this project delivered at the end of the project?

Yes

What was not delivered and what might have caused this?

N/A

Were service requirements met upon project completion?

Yes.

If requirements were not met, what caused this?

N/A

Does the system work as intended?

 It does. They attempted to make some late adjustments per feedback received in
training. A few of those were not able to be completed, but these were extra items not
captured in original scope. We have also been able to make many adjustments
ourselves.

Benefits
From your perspective:

Do the projected benefits match the actual benefits?

From an IT standpoint, I think the actual benefits have been greater. Salesforce is very user
friendly to make simple adjustments to. Based on staff feedback we have been able to
make quite a few. Salesforce provides three annual updates that add features or refresh
the UI. And we are well positioned to pursue a broad range of major adjustments as needed
in the future to better meet the demands of our clientele or staff, since there are many
developers who can assist us in adding to our application.

Are there intangible benefits because of this project?

The sections below were answered as part of the four big

questions that I went over on the first page. I realized I
was repeating the same answers, so I have left this part
blank.

Lessons Learned

From your perspective:

Overall, was the project a success?

What was done really well?

What could have been done better?

What recommendations would you make for future project application?

 What would you do differently if you could do it over again?

What have you learned that can be applied to future projects?

Recommendations

Based on your experiences with this project:

Do you have any advice for future projects?

Did this project uncover or prove any Best Practices?