2. Reactive handling: Going around walls

(This is the second part of the series on Getting stuff done. Read from the beginning)

“Sorry, we cannot deliver this integration before another 2 months with everything else on our plate” said the VP of the ERP systems. One of my CPG clients had a B2B eCommerce program which depended on the integration into the SAP ERP system. We were asked to get the eCommerce storefront on the Magento 2 platform ready for the launch and were told the client was working with their ERP group, but at the last minute we were informed of this blocker. It was a fixed bid and we were in a bind. We could not pull out the resources and use them elsewhere for 2 months and bring the same people back; neither would bringing new resources later be cost-effective as they would have a learning curve, not to speak of the logistic nightmare. The client had a limited budget and was in a fix to support this team for an extended period.

When you hit a wall, look left and right, there should be a door somewhere!

This is where I use the principle of “Going around walls” when we hit a wall. Yes, literally speaking this was a wall because there was no point taking an order on the storefront if it cannot be sent to the ERP system quickly for timely fulfillment.  All the work my team did had to wait another two months. Or was it? We explored all the possible ways to get an order into ERP. The only two ways were a) email an order and b) manually keying it in (by the agent). At first, we explored if we could piggyback on the email order route, by emailing the order from Magento to that job which loads it into the ERP. However, that option soon fizzled out due to some environmental constraints. It seemed like we really hit the wall this time. That is when I took a step back and asked the question of how many daily orders were we expecting on this new site for the first two to three months. Given that the customers are still being onboarded, the answer was just a handful. So I turned around and asked our sponsor, why can’t we use one of our onboarding support agents to key in this handful of orders twice a day? Initially, it was seen as a ridiculous idea, but when we talked through the cost-benefit analysis it made perfect sense. The investment of an hour from this one agent each day would allow us to avoid the project delay by two months. It would allow us to get the learnings from real customers using the site two months sooner. That is how we stuck to the original date and moved forward.

Often times larger enterprises have too many stakeholders and everything is dumbed down to a black or white decision. This is the true reason why they can’t be as nimble as startups. The beauty of on-time delivery lies in working with the 50 shades of gray.

Caution: However this requires the diligence to ensure a sunset date for the work-around is committed by all parties and the workarounds do not get a life of their own, which can become unsustainable later on.