Free Fall

The reasons behind any project's failure are hard to pin down to a single factor. According to Bandopadhyay, Torrent Power's inability to get its ERP off the ground comes down to three factors: a lack of organizational readiness, a lack of consultant experience, and that big project killer: a lack of user adoption.

These challenges overwhelmed the consultants. "The consultants were awarded the project in January 1998," recalls Bandopadhyay. In July of 2000 -- 30 months later -- the consultants were still rolling out modules and running the operational modules in parallel.

The problem, says Bandopadhyay, was that the consultant team was not accustomed to the power utility segment, and because of this, they kept asking for more time to get the project off the ground. They could not close the gap between themselves and their deadline. And as they got more desperate to reach a horizon that never got nearer, they moved away from the safety of the shore. With the pressure to meet finish mounting, the consultants isolated themselves from their users, driving the project on their own.

It was this lack of user involvement that Bandopadhyay says finally brought the project down. "Data entry was being done in parallel for the ERP. Users were frustrated with the dual recording of data and reporting because they had to maintain both systems in sync," he says.

Today, user involvement and change management are project management basics. But a decade ago, it was not such a focal point. Yet, today, it's still hard to bring change into an organization smoothly, which is why the lessons from a decade ago are relevant. By not taking users into the fold, the consultants had seeded failure into the project. "Most of the issues we had were related to the fact that functional users were not involved at the design and development stage by the consultant. They directly showed the software at the time of roll-out and implementation," says Bandopadhyay ruefully.

By the end of 2000, it was beginning to look like a dead-end for the IT team. But they had invested US$21 million and almost three years of their emotion and time and they were going to make a last-ditch attempt to save the project. However, the odds were stacked against them. User resistance, which could have been fixed earlier, had hardened and IT's credibility with the user community of Torrent was low.

Still, they were determined to fix the problem, even if it meant pulling out every last project management stop.

Light at the Tunnel's End

The first thing Bandopadhyay did was to get rid of the consultants. "The users were greatly dissatisfied with the approach of the consultant," Bandopadhyay says.

The move would serve twin purposes: it would hopefully remove an easy target to blame the failure on and more importantly, it would thrust ownership of the project back to the users. "Any ERP implementation should be owned by the functional users and not by a consultant or the IT department," he says.

Getting users to believe in them was not easy, not with an almost-failed project on their hands. But it was equally hard to ignore that the users were their only hope. Hence, says Bandopadhyay, the main objective was to involve user departments including business heads and their teams down the line. "The in-house IT department worked hard to build user confidence," says Bandopadhyay.

To do that, the IT team had a series of meetings with functional users, including people who were doing day-to-day data-entry for each module.

"All users were called together in a big conference room and their issues were discussed in detail. The concern among users was increase in data entry. Finally, with their agreement, a rollout plan was chalked out," says Bandopadhyay. The series of meetings he says, "solved 70 per cent of our issues."

Before he could get there, though, Bandopadhyay and his team set the stage by having meetings in smaller sectional groups. The aim, he says, was to "bring in confidence and a sense of responsibility within each group. And then have a higher-level, cross-functional meeting with each business function head."

Once he had the users on his side, Bandopadhyay set his sights on his next target: top management. "It was discussed with management that, in addition to the huge investments made, a lot of man-hours have already been invested. We also told them that the reason for the project failure was not the ERP software, but the lack of user involvement."

His approach is radically different from the method other CIOs have taken to save projects. Desperate CIOs have been known to leverage top management to whip users into obeying new mandates.

But Bandopadhyay was not going to take that road again. It was a lack of user ownership that had stalled the project the first time and he had learnt a lesson. "Always involve users in the complete lifecycle of a project. The users should own the responsibility of an implementation," he says.

Once this confidence was built, users were ready to take ownership and agreed to a roll-out plan. It was only then that the new plan was presented to management. It was easy to get the formal approval of management once the users were onboard, says Bandopadhyay.

With a groundswell under them, management agreed to Bandopadhyay's plan. "Top management commitment and proper empowerment at each level helped the relevant people drive the project as per schedule," Bandopadhyay points out.