There were very good comments in both Discussion threads this week.

Staffing:

As some of you perceived, you need more than two resources and you did not have enough information to pick the two most important with certainty.  This is “unfair” just like the constraints of staffing a real project.

Here are your votes:

Here is my opinion:

You have to have Project Management skills and someone has to have Project Management authority or the project will fail. The Project Manager I specified for the discussion would probably do well on this project as long as the industry expertise comes from some other source.  Past students have assumed that the Industry Expert must have project management skills and this MIGHT be the case.  I did not give you enough information to determine if any of the other players had the skills necessary to successfully run the project. 

You definitely need someone on the team that understands the SAP software well. The SAP expert that I “gave” you would meet this requirement.  Given the number of times the Project Manager has run SAP projects, this person might be a close second in SAP expertise.  Again, there is not enough information to know.

Almost half of students is prior years selected the Major Consulting firm .  If you get the wrong people from the consulting firm on your project or the consulting firm does not deliver the promised expertise, you have a big problem.  On the other hand, if the consulting firm delivers the right people then you will have all the skills you need. It is up to you as a manager to make sure you consulting team has all the skills that were listed in this Discussion or that you can apply these skills from your in-house staff.

You will need database expertise in the DBMS that you are using.  SAP has thousands of database tables and configuring the DBMS and hardware configuration requires strong skills. You will also need hardware selection and configuration skills. You might get these skills from your hardware vendor or from SAP or from a consultant. The database, hardware and software skills are critical.  You may have already seen this in the Week 3 lecture.

Consultant presentation:

Consultants usually present their best experiences and this requires a good client. For the success that we saw in the presentation, the client must have been organized to make rapid decisions on the configuration of business processes.  This would have required the time and commitment of the top management at the client.  The client must also have staffed the project with the right people. (No consultant can deliver success like this without the client “doing it right”.

For an implementation project to be finished within nine months, the scope has to be set correctly. The areas of the business and the software components used have to selected and controlled carefully.  As you mentioned in the first presentation, it is possible that the overall implementation takes years but that each individual project is scoped to take a “short” period of time.

My experience is that for a project to succeed, someone must “own” it. That “owner” should either be on the project full time or someone who reports to the “owner” should be on the project full time. It is possible to bring people onto the project just when they are needed.  However, you still need an individual to own the outcome.