Project kickoff in real time

Many of my inspirations are formed during my mind’s journey into the depths of a much needed sleep.  Fortunately (for me and those around me), my internal censors don’t allow most of them to make the return trip to my conscious state.  Today’s post is a survivor born on a 7:10AM flight en route to Portland Oregon.

Periodically, over the course of the next 90 days, I’m going to be blogging about the implementation of our service for the latest member of the b2b2dot0 family, Blount, Inc.

My inspiration is simple.

While I think our technology is awesome, and I know everyone associated with b2b2dot0 is exceptional, and I have full faith in our Agile implementation approach, it’s impossible to capture the magic of the combination of all three “after the fact”.

So I’m going to do it in real time.

This first installment is being written in between flights at Gate A23 in DFW en route to the project kickoff in Portland tomorrow.

According to the contract that was signed on March 31, there really are two projects here.  A US implementation enabling Blount’s Distributors to track orders and eInvoices and an European implementation that will enable full order management capabilities country by country.  The US project should be live in 30 days while the European project should be live in 90 days. Our objectives for tomorrow are:

1. Assemble the project team and begin the collaboration process
2. Set the overall scope, measures of success and milestone plan for the US implementation
3. Conduct the first Focus Group on version 1.0 of Blount’s new SAP integrated eCommerce website

The flurry of activity in the four working days in between contract signing and tomorrow’s Focus Group were geared to produce two very important results.

The first was a “mini-project” designed to test our two organization’s abilities to collaborate and the second was to actually produce a working model (version 1.0) of our b2b2dot0 service integrated with Blount’s SAP QA system.

I think we passed the collaboration test with flying colors and the following screenshot is what my userid sees when it logs into Blount’s system from the web.  Three points to underscore, which makes the fact that all of this was done in the space of a couple of days pretty amazing, are:

1. the https url verifies that we’ve established a secure connection from my browser, through Blount’s private slice of our b2b2dot0 service, all the way through to Blount’s SAP system via a secure VPN.
2. the “Recently Placed Web Orders” entitled “firstorder” is evidence that we’ve mapped Blount’s SAP configuration to our b2b2dot0 service and that we’re able to update Blount’s SAP system
3. the “Overdue Invoices” listing confirms that we can read invoice data and that there is a lot of good test data available :-)

Let the project adventures begin!

Sam

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