Week 1

We kicked off the project discussions on 8/16/10. We formed a small core group to discuss how to go about securing the funding. I will not get into too many details, but we decided to formulate the Business case, and a full project plan with as much as detail as possible within two weeks. Its a pretty aggressive timeline, but now worries, we"ll get it done.

We met a few times during this week to discuss the items below

1. Re-implementation vs Upgrade: As our system is fairly customized we wanted to explore the option of Re-implementation instead of traditional upgrade. We have heard some good and bad things about both the approaches, and haven't made a final decision at this point...although leaning more towards an Upgrade.
2. Scope items (in/out items on a high level)
3. Project structure: Outsource vs Staff Aug. Ruled out outsourcing as we didn't have great results doing that in the past. We discussed on how many consultants we will need, how to pair them up with the FTEs and the Project governance model
4. Phase 1 Tasks: How long should the Fit/Gap phase be, whether we should look at all the customizations and catalog them. How to go about documenting the current state of the system etc.

We had some interesting brain storming sessions and everybody pitched in enthusiastically. As a PM its very important for me to make sure that these sessions, or any future sessions for that matter remain interesting and not become monotonous.

While we didn't have any pre-defined deliverable for this week, we made significant progress on Phase 1 Business case and Project Plan.