The Blog has been a bit quiet lately, mainly because we have been running around building new systems, developing existing systems, and hardly taking time for meals. Under pressure it is not always easy to be creative. However spending today in Leeds, discussing the planned Caseworks implementation workshops next week, gave me the idea that maybe no-one had ever done a Blog of a systems implementation. It is a risky strategy, given the number of high profile national IT projects which have gone over budget, over time and have been blamed for everything from Stock Market crashes to Baggage Handling bottle necks.
Suffice to say, that the Leeds ALMOs have purchased Caseworks, and (unlike some previous implementations) we and our customers are determined to be both thorough and rapid. Our strategy is to conduct a really focussed two week workshop, where 12 of us will practically live together, a bit like Big Brother. Not really, but my colleague and I are going to rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks, and a meeting room is booked. The challenge is to do in 2 weeks, a process which has taken others months – and to do it properly. We plan to liaise and implement customisation changes with a 24 hour turnaround, and in the process our Leeds team will become experts in Caseworks and HUBSolutions will become experts on Leeds ASB procedures. The challenge is greater because there are effectively four customers – three ALMOs and a TMO are already working very differently - so the system is going to have to be very flexible indeed. Doubtless we will be rushing out system enhancements to meet their needs, and this is part of the challenge.
Today was very much Day One, the installation of an empty un-customised database on the Leeds servers. It all went smoothly, but the previous day where I was preparing the database was really the first stress point. Having earlier told Leeds that the Property Gazetteer they provided looked fine, I found it was in the new NLPG format which messed up my import routines. It took a half day to re-write the code; then it became obvious that despite the presence of 350,000 properties in the file, there were many others missing. A panic email to Leslie, my Leeds contact, and hopefully we are on our way to resolving this - the first of many problems I expect.
Read the next episode on Tuesday – I am hoping to get some guest contributions next week!
Suffice to say, that the Leeds ALMOs have purchased Caseworks, and (unlike some previous implementations) we and our customers are determined to be both thorough and rapid. Our strategy is to conduct a really focussed two week workshop, where 12 of us will practically live together, a bit like Big Brother. Not really, but my colleague and I are going to rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks, and a meeting room is booked. The challenge is to do in 2 weeks, a process which has taken others months – and to do it properly. We plan to liaise and implement customisation changes with a 24 hour turnaround, and in the process our Leeds team will become experts in Caseworks and HUBSolutions will become experts on Leeds ASB procedures. The challenge is greater because there are effectively four customers – three ALMOs and a TMO are already working very differently - so the system is going to have to be very flexible indeed. Doubtless we will be rushing out system enhancements to meet their needs, and this is part of the challenge.
Today was very much Day One, the installation of an empty un-customised database on the Leeds servers. It all went smoothly, but the previous day where I was preparing the database was really the first stress point. Having earlier told Leeds that the Property Gazetteer they provided looked fine, I found it was in the new NLPG format which messed up my import routines. It took a half day to re-write the code; then it became obvious that despite the presence of 350,000 properties in the file, there were many others missing. A panic email to Leslie, my Leeds contact, and hopefully we are on our way to resolving this - the first of many problems I expect.
Read the next episode on Tuesday – I am hoping to get some guest contributions next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment