Pyramid of Control

The next step before Torrent was to come up with a structure that would ensure successful turnaround. This process would play a significant role in ensuring the successful completion of the project. But before this process was initiated, the newfound buy-in from the staff had to be channelized.

The structure involved a committed, full-time core team -- and since the focus was on the user, this team was to involve all functional users. In order to ensure balance, the team was carefully selected to get a mix of functional and technical resources with complementary skills. This team was to involve itself with business processes since the user-focus mandated the involvement of business process owners.

Then they sought support from data owners to clean the data, converting it as required, and then migrate it. End users were active participants in acceptance testing, training and owning the system.

With this framework of buy-in, Torrent moved ahead. To begin with, the structure added an executive sponsor, who represented the commitment of the top management to the project. The executive sponsor's duty was to define the overall vision of the implementation, ensure support and commitment from individual functional heads, and to participate in -- and authorize -- important communication and change management initiatives across the organization.

Aiding the executive sponsor was a steering committee, which was responsible for the successful completion of the implementation. The committee comprised senior management from Torrent Power and the systems integrator. This committee met regularly to review the status of the project and authorize necessary action for critical project activities.

Special care was also taken to ensure that the steering committee was properly staffed with relevant people. Members of the steering committee had to be nominated by the executive sponsor. To ensure active user participation, the heads of various departments were selected.

To perform the actual implementation, Torrent created a project management team that included a project manager from Torrent and a project manager from the system integrator. Both these project managers had to interact closely with each other -- and with the steering committee -- in order to complete the project.

Below the project managers were the process leaders, whose responsibility was to ensure the successful design and configuration of various modules of the solution in line with business needs. To avoid the problem faced with the consultants -- namely, a lack of core domain expertise in power utility -- these process leaders were specifically chosen after ensuring that they had knowledge of how the organization worked. This was critical because the process leader was responsible for all the divisions and areas that were impacted by a specific set of processes.

Aiding the process leaders were the core team members, who were drawn from all functions where a process was to be implemented. The main aim was to ensure that, between the process team leader and the process team members from Torrent Power, the group must possess adequate knowledge of business processes and issues.

In addition, there was also a data management team from Torrent Power, which was responsible for coordinating all data collection activities pertaining to the implementation.

"IT teams involved all functional people including senior and junior staff. They were requested to work as a team and to treat the project as their own. The challenge was to show management that an internal team could do what a consultant could not," says Bandopadhyay.