The Curse of Lorenzo Dow, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Content Management Projects

As some background; I was born in England, carry a Kiwi passport and live in Sydney. This gives me a foot in many camps and I feel justified in gloating a little about the recent Bledisloe Cup win (for the non-antipodeans you may need to Google it) but that’s not to say that I don’t recognise the contributions that Australia has made to the rest of the world; Neighbours, Paul Hogan, Kylie Minogue – the list goes on…

However, there have been many great things coming out of Australia (I’m resisting any temptation to play the New Zealander and say the flight to Wellington    ) but goods things don’t happen without a few glitches and the achievement that springs to mind is..

The Sydney Harbour Bridge

A few facts:

• The total length is 1,149m and the arch spans 503m and is 134m above sea level
• It took 6 years to build and contains approximately 6 million rivets
• The original tender was for approximately 5 million pounds, however it eventually cost 10 million pounds (I’ve seen costs as high as 13 million quoted)
• The project started in 1926, finished in 1932 and was eventually paid off 62 years later in 1988
• 16 lives were lost during the project

Now, of course, without the bridge Sydney would not have been able to become the city that it has – never mind that Sydney simply couldn’t afford to build it today.

It was (and is) a source of great national pride, kept a lot of people employed during the depression and as a result, the benefits to the overall city were (and still are) immense but if we did a post implementation review we would probably sack the sponsor and the Project Manager.

So, what are the parallels with a Content Management project?

If we look at it flippantly it’s simple. I’m sure that anyone who has worked on projects (not just Content Management) for a vendor or a Systems Integrator for any period of time can see the similarities:

• Tender processes run with a large weighting on lowest price
• Overly optimistic view of simplicity (or complexity) and budget blow out
• Incomplete business case (based purely on hard costs) and occasionally a similar number of casualties!!

But joking aside, this is exactly the situation. The usual process can drive us down this route, making it very difficult to compete whilst maintaining a level of integrity – this is often because the project budget is known and fixed and ultimately, when customers are faced with what on the face of it are similar proposals, it comes simply down to price.

To counter this and to make the bid compliant, suppliers need to take measures to meet the budget by:

• Reducing the scope of the project (this is what we can do with the money you want to spend)
• Cut back the completeness of services provided – the usual areas being:
  • Business requirements analysis
  • Project management / project governance
  • Organisational change management
  • Training / end user enablement and post production support

These are, however, necessary components of the project and will come back into scope leading to increased cost through change control.

In the example of the Harbour Bridge, the designer, John Bradfield, who was appointed chief engineer of the project after winning a design competition in 1911, apparently made 101,556 changes throughout the construction!

Now, I’m a big opponent of the ‘low-balling/change control’ approach as ultimately it benefits no-one – yet why is it so widespread?

Well it’s best explained by the quote from the book ‘Warsaw Requiem’ by Bodie Thoene

“What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient”

And that about sums it up – when faced with this sort of dilemma the usual approach is to take the path of least resistance which brings me to…

The Curse of Lorenzo Dow

Now, one man who didn’t take the path of least resistance was Lorenzo Dow.

Lorenzo Dow was an itinerant, evangelist, American preacher who made an overnight stay at Jacksonborough in around 1820 and his visit there is one of Georgia’s most enduring legends.

Dow was an eccentric character who, early in his ministry, walked from town to town passing out leaflets during the day and preaching in the evening. Referring to himself as ‘Crazy Dow’ he was often an object of scorn and abuse in the towns he visited. Later in his ministry he gained a reputation as one of the leading American evangelists, preaching to crowds of many hundreds.

In Jacksonborough, however, he was not greeted with open arms…

Dow’s evening sermon was interrupted by a group that had gathered to break up the service by heckling and throwing rotten eggs. Now Dow could have followed the path of least resistance and cleaned himself up and left town but instead he followed the group into a whiskey store. The legend has it that Dow, a man who was not one to be intimidated whilst doing ‘God’s work’, used an iron tool to break open a barrel of whiskey, dumping its contents across the floor. Dow was rescued by a man named Seaborn Goodall, who took Dow home for the night.

The angry mob gathered at the Goodall home the following day with a supply of eggs and tomatoes. Dow walked out of town under a barrage of fruit and eggs, stopping at the Beaver Dam Creek Bridge.

Dow did as Jesus told his disciples in the New Testament,

“If the people in the town will not welcome you, go outside the town and shake their dust off your feet. This will be a warning to them.” (Luke Ch 9),

So, Dow shook the dust of the town from his feet and prayed a curse on the town – that no business would prosper, that no home would stand in that town forever, except the home of Seaborn Goodall. The crowd laughed at him but his curse was fulfilled by a series of mysterious disasters spanning many years, where eventually there was nothing left except the bridge, the road, and the home of Seaborn Goodall. Through it all, the Goodall home stood solid, always unburned by the fires, undamaged by the storms and floods.

Now I’m not for a moment suggesting that we curse the people who write and issue RFTs / RFPs (although after a few long days and nights writing tenders or proposals the occasional ‘curse’ is sometimes uttered) but I am suggesting that a different approach may be better than ‘shaking the dust off our feet’. I realise that many organisations, especially Government are constrained in this regard but the arms length nature of the process makes it very difficult to arrive at the perfect outcome (I’m open to comments here as to where we can make the process work better)

Content Management Projects

So back to Content Management…

At EMC Information Intelligence Group, Australia and New Zealand, we have put in a huge pamount of effort to ensure that our projects exhibit all of the best parts of the Sydney Harbour Bridge such as:

• High user adoption
• Fitness for purpose
• Delivering ongoing benefits to the wider community

Whilst minimising the worst parts:

• Project overrun
• Long payback period
• Casualties!!

Our job as Content Management professionals is to guide our customers – this is why we are called Consultants, they rely on us to lead them to a successful outcome and as such we have made a significant shift away from the typical vendor Professional Services organisation as being purely experts in the technology.

In the Documentum World, our customers have told us that they want us to change – so we have.

Why Content Management Projects Fail

Content Management projects fail for a number of reasons but in my opinion, the first and by far the biggest reason for project failure is a lack of an over-arching Information Strategy and ill-defined business requirements and the second reason that they sometimes fail to realise the full benefits is a lack of ongoing optimisation.

Information Strategy & Business Requirements

In the same way that the Sydney Harbour Bridge requirements were not simply to build a bridge to cross Sydney Harbour (Port Jackson), an organisation’s Information Strategy should not be simply to capture, integrate, process and deliver information in a clean, consistent and timely fashion. Further, a Content Management solution’s requirement is not simply to provide a unified repository to manage an organisation’s content….

In EMC we now focus a lot more effort on business consulting; EMC now has a team of strategic business consultants who work with an organisation to undertake a number of tasks including but of course not limited to;

• Assisting with a detailed, over-arching Information Strategy,
• Defining a the Content Management Roadmap and fully costed business case,
• Gathering and documenting detailed requirements,
• Defining an Organisational Change Management Plan, including end-user enablement

As we move more into Case Management (with xCP) this becomes even more important, no longer can our focus be purely on the technology as it is business process that drives the solution and if we get all of the above right then the chances of success are increased considerably.

Ongoing Optimisation

The Sydney Harbour Bridge would have rusted away by now without ongoing maintenance. It would have been unrealistic to expect that, once Captain Francis De Groot ‘accidentally’ cut the tape (prior to the official opening!!), the bridge would continue to function and adapt to the changing needs of the bridge users without routine maintenance, emergency repairs, design enhancements and upgrades (as new technologies became available).

With regard to Documentum, traditionally EMC’s answer to the proactive support needs of our customers was remote product support supplemented with ad-hoc Consulting. However, in response to feedback from our installed base, EMC has developed a proactive range of services to address:

• Performance, Stability and Availability
• Software currency
• Problem management, configuration management, change management, release management etc.

Business critical projects like this need to be maintained and optimised and without this, the solution (be it a bridge or Documentum) will fall into a state of disrepair…

By concentrating on these two areas, while continuing to do what vendors do best (understand the technology) then we are ensuring that our projects are successful in the eyes of both our customers and EMC, but it requires a considerable change in our approach to communicating this extra value.

Continuing along the path of least resistance and competing on price to the detriment of value, whilst looking for opportunities to change or manage the budget upwards is destined to lead to poor customer satisfaction.

On the other hand, ‘shaking the dust off our feet’ by not attempting to meet the budget and qualifying out of opportunities will not allow us to survive.

Lorenzo Dow is also famous for the saying “We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t” and without finding a ‘third way’ that’s exactly the position we’ll find ourselves in.

Lawrence

Case Management · Documentum · ECM · Enterprise Content Management

Now the blog is up and running I’m getting sent a lot of interesting links to other postings concerning Documentum and xCP – it seems as though the Documentum World is really starting to get excited about Case Management and it’s applications.

Here’s one by Robin East that was recently sent to me suggesting that Documentum xCP would be ideal in applying case management to British Freedom of Information requests currently managed by MySociety.org in the UK. The site received over 15,000 requests which were handled manually! Click here to read a detailed breakdown of the responses which, not surprisingly, included double ups, errors and delays…

Case Management · Documentum