DATA MANAGEMENT | ON DEMAND
“We had to create a whole mind-set change so that everyone would think
more globally and be more flexible in meeting times.”
—Philip J. Cognetta, Jr., Vice President of Enterprise Product Engineering, Iron Mountain
include the maintenance of financial
systems. “It’s not our core competency—
it’s time consuming and takes away from
more-strategic initiatives, like supporting
our customers’ growing information protection and storage needs,” says Cognetta.
So as part of the financials project, the
company decided to outsource the global
financial applications to a single instance
of Oracle E-Business Suite 11i on the
Oracle On Demand infrastructure, along
with allotting application support to an
Oracle Global Support Center provided
by Oracle Consulting’s North American
India Organization (NAIO) team, located
in Bangalore, India. Since the company
targeted Australia, New Zealand, and
Brazil as the first countries to move onto
the new systems, Cognetta was contemplating a project that involved team
members in Australia, New Zealand,
Brazil, India, Boston, and the Oracle On
Demand data center in Austin, Texas.
“We had to create a whole mind-set
change so that everyone would think
more globally and be more flexible in
meeting times,” says Cognetta.
PROJECT SETUP
Faced with the challenge of managing
a project of this complexity and magnitude, Iron Mountain turned to Oracle
Consulting to create and implement a
global project management office (PMO)
that would bring this multiphased,
multimillion-dollar, multiyear project in
on time and within budget.
“Our internal project managers
engaged with Oracle Consulting to do
a couple of important things: set up
a global PMO [project management
office] and create a working project
management governance model that
would take us through all phases of the
project,” says Cognetta.
The first step was building the governing structure. “A PMO is required
with any global implementation,”
says Paddy Padmanabhan, consulting
project director with Oracle Consulting’s
Northeast Commercial practice. “With
such scattered teams, it was vital to
establish a structure for how reports
were built and reviewed and to establish
a reviewing process with Australia, New
Zealand, and Brazil.”
The program management governance
model defined how the team assessed its
progress on a weekly basis, how issues
>>SNAPSHOT
Iron Mountain
www.ironmountain.com
Employees: More than 18,500
Revenue: US$2.4 billion in 2006
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, including
Financials and Human Resources;
Oracle Discoverer; Oracle On
Demand; Oracle Consulting
were addressed and resolved or escalated,
and how changes were handled across
the project.
In fact, the PMO built an inventory of
communications tools and instructions
on how to use them as part of the governance model. The group used a simple
dashboard concept that provided a quick
visual tool to assess both the current and
forecasted progress. Sections within each
project, such as business process workflows, project management, and application development, were characterized
with green, yellow, or red signals, which
let the team quickly know where potential trouble spots lay.
The team worked to build a detailed
project plan that included every phase
of the project, including a task to assimilate the lessons learned and knowledge
capital from each go-live. “We developed
a global implementation toolkit that is
being leveraged for all the countries that
Iron Mountain has and will eventually
bring onto their global instance,” says
Denise Duncan, senior practice director
with Oracle Consulting. This toolkit contains detailed project plans, implementation schedules, meeting inventories, test
scenarios, technical specifications, and
code, as well as the Iron Mountain global
standard business processes, key business
decisions, and configurations to be established across the world.
“The toolkit was created as a cookie-cutter approach, so the team doesn’t need
to start from scratch with each country,”
says Duncan. The team also had to
develop global settings for issues such
as tables within the system and how to
convert invoices. “We had to make those
global decisions at the outset. Once they
are implemented in one country, you
can’t change them,” says Duncan.
The PMO acted as the central point
of coordination, passing on communications from teams that couldn’t meet due
to time zone differences. And with NAIO
in Bangalore developing conversions and
customizations, the Oracle On Demand
team in Austin, and the implementation teams in each country, clear channels of communication were vital. “We
had to have almost redundant meetings
with recaps, because it was difficult to
get everybody on the same call without
it being in the middle of the night for
somebody,” says Cognetta.
To describe the process as complex
is a major understatement. Once the
infrastructure was in place, the team
started using e-mail as a primary form
of communication.
EARLY SUCCESS
The first targets were Australia and New
Zealand, as the region was a recently
acquired business—a division of a larger
company—that was dependent on its
former parent company for financials.
With the former owner turning off that
system on a specific date, the team knew
