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 South Pole Expd'n
 

The South Pole Expedition

Philips Display Components

The Technical Product Information project implementation at Philips Display Components was at the critical roll-out stage and running into trouble. On this particular project there were several different organisations involved in the implementation, namely:  the vendor supplying the PLM software, the outsourcing organisation providing the IT infrastructure, various independent system experts and the Philips engineering departments which were receiving the new system.

The project was failing due to many apparently minor technical problems caused mainly by:

bullet A lack of communication and trust between the vendor and the outsourcing organisation.  A lot of this was due to conflicts in business interests.
bullet Failure to deliver correctly tested software from the vendor.
bullet Lack of management of the independent experts.
bullet No single technical Project Management focus

The consequences of this were:

bullet Two failed pilot implementation roll-outs
bullet Increasing unrest amongst the Engineering User community
bullet Threats to cancel the project by the board which would have had major implications on the company.

In order to rectify the situation, a sub-project named the South Pole Expedition (SPE) was started which was led by Ken Tomlinson.  The SPE formed a core mixed discipline team taken from each of the disparate parties.  Each member of the SPE was drafted full time into the team, reporting directly to Ken Tomlinson as the Project Manager and interfacing back into their organisation.  The SPE developed a detailed plan of work based on an agreed scope.  The results were that:

bullet The system implementation was successfully rolled out to the revised SPE plan on time.
bullet The Engineering community was kept fully informed of the SPE progress, trust and backing for the new system returned.
bullet Delighted with the result, the project board agreed to sponsor the next phases of the overall project.

 

Within 4 months the approach of the SPE project provided a major project turn-around which allowed the Technical Product Improvement project to achieve it mission critical vision.