FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

Our response would have been familiar to anyone who knew us well: JFDI!

I knew next to nothing about computer systems, but I knew I wanted the best, and I knew that we would have to bring someone in to manage the process for us – we’d never done anything like that before. We knew that Ed Lynott was the right person for us as soon as we met him at the interview, but he wasn’t familiar with the way we did things at Conways. ‘My interview was peculiar,’ he said afterwards, ‘because I had to do a long presentation, and at the end of it there was only one question – after an hour and a half ! When it was over, they said thank you, and I walked out wondering if that was it.’ The reason for this was simple: Ed had come prepared with business cases and return-on-investment justifications, and we didn’t need any of that – what we needed was him . Our response would have been familiar to anyone who knew us well: JFDI! (JFDI translates roughly as ‘yes, please, get on with it and don’t take too long about it’). But what we were asking Ed and his team to do was a massive task. To put it into perspective, we were giving them £5 million and a little over a year to do what it had taken Balfour Beatty £35 million and ten years to achieve. Their task was not simply to migrate our systems onto an Oracle platform; that makes it sound far too easy. Their task was to agree and standardise processes and systems across the organisation that we could then use the Oracle platform to turn into our own system, which we now call i-CON. It would be misleading to say that all our processes had to change to fit into the system, but there did have to be substantial change, and that was not going to be easy, or quick. The fact that Ed got through five project managers in the first sixteen months of the project tells you something about the pressure they were working under.

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