Write a Final Capstone Reflection Paper

By- Govind Rao Kurupathi

Harrisburg University

GRAD 699

Table of Contents

Implementation methodology: Tesla will be implementing this project on the traditional or also called the waterfall based implementation methodology. Stakeholder involvement is critical to the project and is encouraged to provide feedback and suggestions in every step of the implementation. Stakeholders will be included requirements, design and testing phases of the project. The project will advance to the next phase only after a formal signoff is received from the stakeholders of Tesla. This methodology is solution driven and the solutions are defined before the start of the project. It is based on the iterative approach based where multiple runs of UAT sessions are done to make sure the solution meets the business needs.

The scope of the project is to implement Oracle’s e-business suite of application and help the organization perform the end to end business cycles like procure to pay, order to cash, finance to accounting in the new system. In addition, the newly implemented system must allow future enhancements based on business requirements.

The main objective is to implement a robust application that will support the growth of the company and meet the following objectives.

The benefits associated with implementing the new version of Oracle EBS can enormous. Below are important benefits.

· Ability to recognize partial revenue for a period

· Funds optimization with cash pooling and zero balancing

· Disabled Accounts Replacement

· Oracle Payments allows an organization to centrally credit and debit payments

· Single point of access allows efficient management of Bank accounts and numerous banks

· Enhanced reporting for transactions

· Clock In/Clock Out for actual time capture

· Cosigned inventory allows a reduction in carrying and order management cost

Risk: Implementing an ERP system is often thought of as an expensive and risky project. Implementing an ERP project often takes 1-2 years to complete based on the modules implemented. Second, the entire business process is changed and as the transactions are done in a unique way in the new software as previously done in the legacy systems. Quality time must be spent by the business and the implementing partner to identify the risks in the current business process and find ways to mitigate the risks.

Constraints: below are a few constraints that were observed.

· Some users do not like the idea of migrating to a new system. Hence the managers must put an effort to help them understand the benefits of the new system and how it can overcome their current issues.

· Training does not come cheap; the upper management must invest in training users with the new software. In a situation where a trained user leaves the company, the newly hired employees must get up to speed with the new system/ software.

· As the entire implementation costs an arm and leg for the company. The top management personnel must invest time and money to support the training users and hire business systems analysts to support the day to day system related activities

TRADITIONAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

The waterfall methodology has been a successful methodology in most Oracle ERP implementation in a manufacturing environment. A manufacturing industry relies heavily on accuracy and standardization as their main goal in their business processes. Hence, Implementing the ERP software for Tesla in a waterfall framework will help the company adhere to standardizing their day to day business process in the system.

The methodology is called waterfall because each phase of the project will flow to the next phase after the prior phase is completed. However, most Oracle implementations may not always experience linear progression. There could be some uneventful instances where the phases in the project may have to shift places. For instance, if issues are found in the implementation stage, the must go back to the design phase to see if the code was not built properly or in some cases the project may have to go all the way back to the requirements stage to reinvent the wheel.

The waterfall methodology is seen in the below diagram.

Initiating phase: This phase the vision of the project what needs to be accomplished. The scope of the project is defined, stakeholders are identified and the project charter is created.

Planning Phase: This is a very important phase of the project where the scope is defined in a more detailed level. The risks, milestone, and budget are defined in this phase.

Executing phase: In this phase, what was planned in the planning phase is now executed in the execution phase. Here the project team is working on the project whereas the project manager is coordinating the resources.

Closing phase: The closing of the project is done by the project manager. The PM formally closes the project by archiving the lessons learned document and releasing the resources form the project. The lessons learned document must be centrally present in the database so that in case if any issue comes up the future, the documented related to the issue must be easily accessible.

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS

Agile methodology is around since the year 2000. Agile was a new framework that was developed to overcome the issues present in the waterfall model. The projects related to Waterfall often led to over expenditure and a large number of process documentation. Agile on the other hand focuses on an iterative approach that broke a task into a smaller task and took an iterative approach to complete the work. The Agile frameworks’ s main principle is to quickly respond to customer demands in an accurate manner.

Implementing Agile Methodology:

User story: instead of over documenting the workflow and technical requirements as done in the waterfall framework, Agile uses a much simpler approach to called “user story writing” to record the requirements. Each feature is considered a story and each story is prioritized in placed in the product backlog for the team to work on.

Sprints: Agile uses “sprints” to deliver finished segments to the ERP implementation. Each sprint can last up to 2 to 3 weeks based on the what is set by the team. A sprint is worked on by the players and stakeholders to solve the roadblocks and successfully complete a feature also called as a potentially shippable product. A the end of each sprint, the scrum team performs a “sprint retrospective” to understand what went right, wrong and how to make sure the same mistakes do not happen in the following sprints.

Scrum Planning meetings:

One of the failures of the waterfall model is that there is very little flexibility in terms of introducing a change in the project. In Sprints, the change is worked on by the scrum team and the roadblocks if any, are cleared by the concerned team member and alternates are discussed if the roadblock is not easy to overcome in the project. In a scrum planning meeting, the product owner and the scrum team sit together and discuss the complexities of the various stories present in the product backlog.

Daily scrum: Every day the scrum team sped 15 minutes of their day to go over what was done yesterday, what is being done today and discuss the impediments that are stopping a team member from completing these tasks. The scrum master can act to involve additional resources to over the impediment.

Conclusion: Once the feature “goes live” the team can use create lessons learned document to capture all the mistakes that were done in the current feature before going live. The lessons learned document is useful for the team as the same mistakes can be avoided in the upcoming sprints.

Framework #2: Lean Software Development

The principle of lean software development is built on the idea that less is more and to streamline every process in the software development cycle so that the wastes associated with the business process is eliminated.

The concept of efficiencies is applied to in order to reduce wastes associated with each individual, department, interdepartmental operations and the organization as a whole

The different types of wastes are listed as follows:

Waste 1: Partially done work As the above title suggests, it means that when the work is not completed as per what is defined as done. Incomplete work cannot be demoed or showcased to the client as the client will not accept partially completed work and thus causes a delay in the process

Waste 2- Extra features This type of waste is also called gold plating in project management. I’ve often observed that the team puts in extra effort to satisfy the client by providing more features than what is asked for

Waste #3: Relearning

The waste 3 relearning is like reinventing the wheel and not using the existing resources present in the team. This can be a lack of knowledge sharing within the team and also because of the team members are scattered in different departments of the company.

Waste #4: Hand-offs Handing off work from one person of the team to another can often result in waste as there is time involved in the passing as well as the time involved for the next person to start working on the story.

Waste #5: Delays Delays are considered the highest wastage in the project as a delay is created to deliver value add and a delay is created before a value add is initiated. A delay can also be caused because of approval from a certain member of a department before initiating change in the process.

Waste #6: Task Switching This is a common waste in most of the teams in a project where a team member skips the current task in hand and moves on to the next task. This creates incomplete work which cannot be demoted to the client.

Waste #7: Defects This defect is based on the fact garbage in garbage out, good in good out. Wrong functionality can lead to the wrong output of the system. Hence it is necessary to understand the story of carefully before designing the functionality

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the capstone paper talks about the two different framework i.e. Agile and waterfall methodologies. Both frameworks have their own pros and cons as listed above. The above information was reviewed from a few selected published articles and studies indicate that the implementation of methodologies (Agile/ waterfall) success does not purely depend on the either Agile or waterfall methodology, but depends on selecting the methodology based on the nature of the industry. Hence, it would be difficult to conclude with the framework is best suited for implementing an ERP software. As most of the issues are discovered in the maintenance phase of the project, the framework used must have the scope to welcome changes in the project.

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