My Role:  Technical Architect. I was part of a multi-company consulting team brought in to resolve long-standing issues.

Problem:  Multiple factions within the corporation were squabbling about the next automation steps. The IT department itself was factionalized but did not want to abandon its current approach, which it thought sound, and had become defensive. Outside consultants had spent a year but still had not provided credible costing analyses. The leading faction had spent millions on software without a clear picture of how those products would be used.

Solution:  It was clear that management's interests would best be served by determining how much the project would cost. After extensive interviews with the various factions and deep investigation in the IT department, my team developed a plan that addressed the concerns of all the factions and yielded a usable, expandable, forward-looking system. I then took that final system design and developed a two-year plan for evolving from the current system to the new system. To make the evolution clear, I created a Visio drawing showing the state of the system on a quarterly basis. The plan and drawing were tied to a system sizing and budgeting model I created showing all the costs on a quarterly basis.

Outcome:  Management had been operating on the assumption that the new system would cost $15 million. Our projection was that the evolution would actually cost $43 million including the monies already spent. This shock resulted in extensive executive "reshuffling" and a fallback to a simpler plan. That simpler plan was based on existing systems (which I found adequate) and was modeled on my evolution concept.

Document:  Architecture Evolution. Click on the image below to view or right-click to download an Adobe PDF (275KB) of the drawing. This multi-page PDF is best viewed in Adobe Reader's full-screen mode as a slide show. Use the cursor keys to move from page to page. Most browsers will not display PDF slideshows.

 

 

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