We've seen it time and again--no matter how much is written about the problems that dog ERP rollouts, companies don't learn from others' mistakes. Sure, it's unlikely an ERP project will ever be a walk in the park, but poor planning, vague technical requirements and a failure to involve IT from the get-go make these implementations more difficult than they need to be.
The subject of this On Location package is a textbook example: In April, Children's Hospital Boston, the country's top pediatric facility, found itself in the midst of an excruciating PeopleSoft implementation. Here's a look at what worked--and what didn't work--through the eyes of the Children's IT staff.
The Plan ... Or Lack Thereof
For any big-ticket project that affects an entire organization, common sense dictates that executives, IT managers, vendors, consultants and business units be involved in the planning and decision-making from the outset, with user input along the way.
However, while Children's had executive-level ownership for its ERP project along with a market-leading software vendor and a respected integrator (Arthur Andersen LLP, which has since been bought by KPMG Consulting and renamed BearingPoint), the hospital relied too heavily on these partners while critical IT project responsibilities did not receive the attention and representation they required. That's because the primary project focus was the business flow and how the application would support it. In the understated words of Children's CTO Scott Ogawa, IT's input "was somewhat devalued."
Indeed. Many key members of the Children's IT department--called ISD (Information Services Division) internally--were shut out of ERP planning until May 2001, fully 18 months after the start of the project and just one month before equipment needed to be ordered. Only when the business information was gathered and development was ready to begin did IT get pulled fully into the loop. And we do mean fully--Andersen shifted the focus solely to IT. Ogawa recalls, "Andersen said, 'IT is up to the plate. IT is holding up the whole ball game now.' "
Because it did not have enough representation with the integration partner, the Children's IT staff was forced to scramble, quickly assessing hardware requirements and ordering equipment without knowing exactly how it would be used. Says Ogawa: "The vendor had a big say in the sizing recommendations." Then, the hardware sat idle for two months because of the false sense of urgency. Project confidence within IT suffered, especially as related to Andersen, which had experience rolling out PeopleSoft applications and on which the Children's IT group relied heavily for guidance.
"I knew some things were going on in the background, but I didn't get pulled in until they needed network access," says Children's Network Manager Mark Hourigan. If he had had time to plan and architect a solution properly, Hourigan says, he would have done things differently. Take the VLAN configuration. He did not know at the time how the development, testing and quality-assurance server environments were being built, so he was unable to segment the production servers to optimize them for the launch.
Hourigan wasn't the only IT person sent scrambling to meet PeopleSoft's and Andersen's requirements. Technical Services Manager Kevin Murray and his team are responsible for the hospital's Windows NT environment and helpdesk. Murray took the initiative and pressed for information about the Process Scheduler component of the PeopleSoft 8.0 architecture. To his chagrin, PeopleSoft was less than forthcoming about the size of the systems required to carry out the Process Scheduler job, he says, perhaps because Children's was one of the first large clients to run this Web-based version of the application.
Behind the Scenes
Go behind the scenes with Children's Hospital Boston to see how its top-notch IT department conducts business amid the pressure and clamor of this fast-paced facility. You can read posts from the staffers and even ask them a question or two of your own.
After playing e-mail tag for awhile, Murray says he was eventually told by a PeopleSoft representative that a "beefy PC" would do the job; however, he was not convinced and asked PeopleSoft for specs in writing, which he eventually received. Still, he was not convinced one box would meet their needs. Turns out he was right--that "beefy PC" has become two Compaq DL580 servers, one running production human resources and financial modules, the other running development applications.
But the story doesn't end there.
In less than a year it became necessary to break the production box into dedicated HR and financial boxes, Murray says. If Children's had not questioned the recommended configuration and had gone with the single PC, it would have found itself rearchitecting just before the go-live date.
Some units did not fare as well. Stuart Cohen, an ISD project manager who got involved with the ERP initiative in May 2001, says the core Sun E450 servers were undersized, as was the storage environment.
Data and user volumes were miscalculated and the hardware was undersized, but tuning the software and database have kept the ERP system running smoothly, Cohen says. Despite the problems surrounding the hardware configuration, he says he was confident that IT would deliver a production-quality environment. "The concern was never ISD [not delivering]," he says. "It was the Andersen reliance on business flow."
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Because it did not have enough representation with the integration partner, the Children's IT staff was forced to scramble, quickly assessing hardware requirements and ordering equipment without knowing exactly how it would be used. Says Ogawa: "The vendor had a big say in the sizing recommendations." Then, the hardware sat idle for two months because of the false sense of urgency. Project confidence within IT suffered, especially as related to Andersen, which had experience rolling out PeopleSoft applications and on which the Children's IT group relied heavily for guidance.
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