W2_Abiola Ojo_Producing the first NigeriaAACE Weekly Report

Problem Statement

Producing the first NigeriaAACE Weekly report was a difficult task for the team and the milestone slipped by 4 weeks. Some of the reasons for this included:

1)     The template issued to us by our mentor was not-flexible, was too detailed, complicated, and contained lots of links, formula, macros and repetitions. It took us about 2 weeks to completely understand the template.

2)     The team did not have members with adequate macro experience to modify the template to suit our peculiar need. We needed to expand it to accommodate 19 people as against the 10 people it was originally developed for. We also wanted to track all 7 projects as oppose to just 4 contained in the template.

3)     Team member were not responsive to their report submission - timesheets, project reports etc. They got so engrossed in their personal deliverables - blog posting, paper, studying their materials etc. This conflict of interest between meeting individual targets versus meeting group targets was a real setback for the report and put the team leadership under lot of pressure.

4)     The project controls team which was originally responsible for the report was not on top of it.

5)     Team members are not co-located making conducting physical meetings to make decisions very difficult or almost impossible.

Alternative considered for the Report

Several alternatives were considered for generating the report:

1)     Stick to the template issued by the CFH

Several working-sessions held by the report team to modify the report to fit our peculiar need did not yield much result as we could not get around the report complexities.

2)     Reduce the template to meet just the minimum requirement

Attempts made at reducing the report also proved abortive. The sheets were so interlinked that removing any sheet or information caused distortion on other sheets. This eventually became too time-demanding and we had to drop the idea.

3)     Look for and adopt an existing simpler template

The general consensus was that the CFH may not accept this template and may insist on his template which he has spoken so much about. This idea was dropped for this reason.

4)     Develop our own simple template that will meet the minimum requirement

The general consensus was this will be time consuming and will be tantamount to “re-inventing the wheel.”

Selection Criteria

Our selection criteria were not clearly spelt out at the beginning but as we battled with the report, we were able to identify the following requirements:

1)     The report should meet the minimum reporting requirement of our CFH

2)     The report should be as simple as possible and involve minimal work

3)     The report should be produced within the shortest time possible

Selected Alternative

After about 4 weeks of stumbling and wobbling, and attempts at the first three alternatives failed, the team finally settled for option 4 - develop our own template that will meet the minimum reporting requirement without unnecessary excel fancy. We were sure it will at least meet two of our selection criteria. The selected alternative (option 4) was achieved within three days of rigorous work. The report was submitted in a hurry without some of the curves in a bid to meet the week 5 target. The template however, have the capability for all the curves - SPI, CPI, EAC etc and will be included in week 6 report.

Lessons Learned

1)     So much time was wasted waiting on the project controls team to come up with this report and it never happened. Had the team realized on time, we would have taken some more proactive measures to avoid this unnecessary delay.

2)     Another  team had to be constituted to take up this responsibility for us to achieve this result.

3)     The “do not re-invent the wheel syndrome” did not work in our case.

4)     We should have been bold enough to confront the CFH about his template rather than trying to get around it at all cost.

5)     We need to realize that project or group assignments are the responsibility of all team-members and not just the assigned-project team because in the final analysis, it will affect our overall program performance metric.