The time I handled a big complicated Project

Hello!

I work with a SaaS based company who specialises in Customer Experience Management. I was staffed on an expansion project as the Implementation Manager for 6–8 weeks which required us to Launch a survey of 140 questions!

Context and Project Description:

The client, a leading telecom company, had many packages to offer within their Telecom Service. They had various schemes for various price points, for both B2C customers and SMBs. They had complex metrics to understand the sales for each department and the revenue generation. However, they did not have any idea or way of knowing about their customer’s sentiments and feedback. The only way they were able to gather data was through inbound queries, complaints or calls.

In the given marketplace, where the choices are endless and customer’s experience and word of mouth drive the customers to opt or promote a company, our clients decided to take a proactive approach and understand their customer’s point of view directly from them.

They started a campaign where they would ask detailed questions about the customer’s experience with the product, their likelihood to recommend, recommendations for improvement, etc. To entice the customers, they also added a $1000 gift card for B2C customers and $2000 gift card for SMB customers.

Clients already had an ongoing project with our company. They bought additional hours to implement the new Survey.

The project was already complex due to the sheer number of questions and the following factors just added to the complexity:

• Complex conditioning. Many back-pointers and references to DB.
• A custom solution to be built. This would mean we would have a code in our project which has to be extensively tried and tested.
• Tight Timelines
• Inexperienced team members.

Planning and Approach:

As we had such a big fish to fry, it was important to plan and set milestones. There was no compromise on Timelines and Quality. So, we work on creating a plan by keeping following in mind:

• Divide the project in phases -> Requirement Gathering, Analysis of requirement and conversation around push-backs and best approaches, Built, applying conditioning, external QA, implementing custom solution, internal QA, final testing, client delivery.
• Involving QA team after basic built was completed. This ensured that the skelton was being QAed while we were working on other parts of the program. Saved us a week.
• Proper and Live documentation.
• Training the new folks on job

Problems:

Eventhough we had the full plan laid-out, its inevitable to hit bumps in a complex projects as this. Following are the things that didn’t work well:

• The customer solution was delivered a week later than the expected date. So, it was tested in a sandbox, QAed and then applied to the production. However, once applied, we realised that it was not working as expected. For smooth functioning, the entire code had to be refactored. This was an expected task and required our team to work late for 2 days to accommodate refactoring.
• There was a system update that another member from Servicing team applied on the program. The new patch deployed had a bug and thus it slowed down our implementation and the change that use to need 10 mins, started taking easily 30 mins. The whole team should have been made aware of the changes so that these updates were done after the launch.
• A functionality was sold to the clients which our team later found out that it had a bug and therefore it was removed and in queue for review. We had to push-back the clients after committing on it which is never a good idea.

Conclusion

The project was successfully launched within the timeline and budget. The clients were happy and we had good response from the customers. We later-on held a retrospective where our project was appreciated and encouraged. Also, the new team members were successfully onboarded.