Page 59 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Literally not business as usual

I remember seeing a poster on an IT Project team’s wall once that said – “Business As Usual, Until It
Isn’t”.

The meaning of this was that the IT Project team was geared up to deal with anything, absolutely
ANYTHING. They had structures and strategies in place that would cope with whatever their IT
Projects would throw at them and they’d approach every challenge with the same calm, assured
manner. Until something extraordinary cropped up, at which point they would unleash an
extraordinary response.

Mergers and Acquisitions are the most extreme form of “business NOT as usual”.
For instance, who’d have thought that House of Fraser would one day be owned by Mike Ashley’s
Sports Director in turn that, one day, the parent company (such an iconic name that it graced
Newcastle United’s St James' Park) would rebrand as “Frasers”?

Sports Direct is so famous for its “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model and is seemingly, at
the other end of the spectrum from the “internationally inspirational department store” that is
House of Fraser. I’m not judging either, I shop at and love both, but if their instore approach differs
so wildly – imagine how different their approach to IT might have been?

My friend Mal again is currently working on a merger like this that, from an IT systems point of view,
he describes “like combining rugby league and rugby union”.

Mal told me, “They both use the same shape ball, and on the surface, they are roughly the same
game but when you drill down they could not be more different. Imagine turning up at Wasps and
telling them they’re gonna start playing rugby league or Wigan Warriers and telling them to learn
the rules of union – that’s my every day at the moment.”

Out of your depth

Mal also told me that it was soon clear that his team was out of its depth. This was a really important
and brave realisation.

The company leading the acquisition, Mal’s employer, still had an ambitious portfolio of its own IT
Projects that needed to be delivered and hitting the pause button was not an option. The whole
point of the merger was to gain greater market share – why risk that by taking your foot off the gas?
Innovative, market-disrupting initiatives can’t be put on hold while you make two systems talk to
one another.

Mal’s plan was to draft in Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) resources to help. In the end,
they effectively outsourced all the merger work to an end to end PMO. Mal’s in-house talent could
then focus on the business change projects that they’d set in motion before the merger was
announced and Mal could oversee both sets of IT Projects.

Often, ‘business NOT as usual’ needs unusual reactions – or at least unusual to you. Mal tells me his
PMaaS talent took everything in their stride, largely because they didn’t carry any baggage in the
shape of beliefs about how things ‘should’ be done. They were able to identify best practices from
both sides of the merger and create an integration plan that was in harmony with the best interests
of the new business rather than maintaining a status quo of ‘how we’ve always done this’.