Let us examine the word truth for a moment. Truth as it is defined is a number of different concepts, but basically boils down to honesty, integrity, truthfulness, accuracy.
In the world adults live in the word truth is corrupted over and over to mean, a view, perception, or more commonly a half-truth, or outright lie.
We have examples of this everywhere in our day to day lives, Bernie Madhoff, Tom Petters, people who deny the holocaust, people who deny evolution and believe dinosaurs lived within the last 10,000 years and were created when Adam and Eve were.
In business, we have an even harder time with the truth apparently. Take for a instance the case of the project I am working on now. The company has been laying off people right and left, weekly shutdowns multiple times a year for the entire company, removal of basically anything optional that could be considered fun but costs money from the corporate and employee culture.
Last year, eGlobal Solutions assisted IBM in selling this company IBM WebSphere Commerce to be used as their new delivery platform for their software delivery. In the process eGlobal was not part of the bid to create the customized portion, integration points and implementation of the software. However, earlier this year the project came to our notice and we asked the IT Director for the company who we had been involved in during the sales cycle if they needed some assistance. We were directed to an offshore/onshore company primarily located in Bangalore.
Immediately upon arriving on client site and within 2 weeks, our team recognized there were some serious issues in terms of project direction. In those first several weeks we were told the project was at a cusp. The client had decided that they might have bought the wrong package since the development/implementation partner had listed almost every feature of their new site as custom development. This is actually pretty common with inexperienced implementors of packaged software, as it is easier to use what they know rather than learn the details of a complex package like WebSphere Commerce, Siebel, or SAP.
First thing was to remove this misconception and provide some detailed approach and design documents showing how a majority of what the client needed was part of the package. Second thing was to approach the management team for the implementer, identifying the skills gap and providing several solution alternatives for how to proceed. In the end the implementer decided to only follow one solution path and the result is a project with sliding timelines, removal of key features, and what appear to be quality issues with the design.
No one in their right mind would ask a gardener to do their heart surgery, even for the "right price". But repeatedly we see people lured by the Nirvana of lowered prices from onshore/offshore partners that have them doing exactly that. Here we have a customer who knew going in and from repeated discussions with IBM that the partner they chose was not skilled in the package and had only had one failed implementation of the WebSphere Commerce product. Facts be darned, they did it anyway. In the course of the project we have seen developers who did not have the skills designing and developing core components for the main revenue driving system for this company. The "truth" here is that the desire to save money so blinded the people involved that they have agreed to basically put a spike in their company during the biggest downturn in generations. The "truth" will likely play out with the long term relationship between the implementer partner and customer failing and not continuing after all is said in done. The "truth" will most likely result is more employees being let go, the stock price dropping for the company, and their competition taking their market share. What a drag that as consultants for the implementer eGlobal has no ability to share any of the truth before this house of cards comes down and a company who trusted us initially gets totally shanked.
If this was a onetime occurrence you could put it up to an exception, however, in the real world this is more of the norm than the exception. We have seen huge and small implementers take projects with no experience or even the people to do the project, and exacerbating the issue by providing a fixed bid, fixed timeline, etc. that are not even remotely realistic. If this was only the case with WebSphere Commerce we would again write it up to the package, but over the years we see this with almost any package imaginable. Funny to find out after years in business that it is more likely that the "Force" would be with you, then the "Truth". May the Truth be With You.
George Niece
Solutions Architect
eGlobal Solutions
cel: 1-760-807-8823
AIM: GeorgeNiece
http://www.eGlobal-Sol.com
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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