It's been a while since the last update of this blog, which awfully goes back to February of this year. I got too busy working on my new blog at Bloggista.com, being my first self-hosted blog which is using the Wordpress CMS blogging platform.

Surprisingly, the great and mighty Google gave it a PR3 during its latest round of page rank updates. I started this blog way back in November of last year.

As of now, I am planning to feature different IT and Business Application products and services on this blog. Will also feature different IT Implementation and Consulting companies focusing on those Service Providers that are based in the Philippines. In short, this blog will be transformed into a reference site for those who are looking for tried and tested and reliable business application softwares, IT Solutions and IT providers.

Well I got to finish this one.

After just 2 hours of sleep - nap if some would call it, I was on the 5:10am flight to Zamboanga this morning. After 1 hour and 30 minutes, we landed in Zamboanga, with lots of uniformed and armed policemen. later found out that the chief of the Philippine National Police was my co-passenger.

I rented a van an instructed the driver to bring me to this Nature resort - Woodland somewhere in Zambowood. Well those names sounded like I was and in Singapore.

It was a quiet, relaxing, early morning ride along a narrow road lined with big trees - perhaps, the resort is speaking for itself. Then I remembered the reason why I am here in Zamboanga today - this site's cutover is already delayed for four (4) days now. My team on site - reporting to me myriad of concerns since day one of their arrival (they came 5 days earlier).

I have recommended to the Project Steering Committee in the previous week when I was in Davao that Zamboanga cutover had to be delayed - reasons? Data are simply not signed-off, too much revision requests, poorly prepared, templates not properly filled up, customer master not cleaned up and to simply put it: Data Prep was a mess in this side of the world.

This project involves all of the key functions of my client's organization. We segregated the main activities into three (3) components; Pre-work (Data Preparation) to be managed by the Sales Team, Legacy System cleanup and Migration to be managed by the IT/Technical Team, and the Site Users Training, Cutover and hand-holding support activities which I am managing together with the 12 Consultants we hired, trained in boot-camp and now roll-out experts.

This arrangement enabled us to move from each plants faster - however, this time (as in the case of the previous sites - but not this worse), data preparation activities were simply a failure. Unfortunately, the delay affected the balance activities, and recovering maybe impossible. Lesson learned - this is one of the reasons why companies such as my client, need third party resources/Consultants so that the required dirty work is surely done.

Well going back to the topic, data preparation plays a crucial role in achieving smooth system transition by ensuring all required data are accomplished and submitted, signed-off and cut-off. Data Prep is in the critical path of a project's first milestones.

After a checklist meeting with the whole Zamboanga Team, it was agreed that the migration be run today using 22-Nov transactions, and start the cutover activities tomorrow (Sat). It was a complete turn-around of events, and impressions. Most thought that at the rate preparations were going, Zamboanga may need another week to cutover.

Small victories despite the delay - I should be able to re-configure my next sites' deployment plan easily, and not as complex as earlier feared.

Still, it was a victory.