Case Study: Using Project Management to Recover a Pipeline Scheduling Program

With less than 3 months to go live when the MP project manager was assigned, the project was very much a recovery initiative. The first step in Effective Program Recovery is not to define the problem. It is to correctly define the key stakeholders and get them to define the problem. Only then could the team get everyone marching in the same direction towards delivering.

Another common stumbling block with recovery initiatives is changing resources. Our project manager was actually the third project manager on the project. As such, they needed to establish their credibility with the team from a Project Management perspective before they could truly make traction on the recovery. Initial tasks included a complete overhaul of the existing project plan, performing a financial review, and the completion of a project risk assessment.

The team then met to understand what would make the project a success for each of them. For the Financial department – they needed the ability to connect tariffs to invoices. For Operations, the most important thing was the ability to break down the monthly volume commitments into fungible batches which could be delivered throughout the month. And for the schedulers, it was the ability to optimize batches to meet customer requirements.

In order to define a clear agreement on what was to be delivered, the team needed to clarify the meaning of MVP, or minimum viable product, with both the client teams and the vendor. Only then could they translate that into concrete actions with the development team to move forward.

Finally, the team set up twice-weekly workshops focused on getting the project back on track as well as a weekly re-prioritization workshop. This enabled the team to stay focused on the finish line while also factoring in any re-work required in order to deliver on time.