Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Memories - early 90's - How not to do ISPs, and other stuff...

The previous post mentioned one project I worked on, and it was probably one of several I may have been assigned to. If you work in a typical company, and you are not on a big development project, then you usually have more than one project on the go at any one time.

My focus was still around IEM/IEF. I would like to say it all went smoothly, but how likely is that... The company was divided up into about 12 business units at the time, basically a combination of product line and geography, like Canadian Life or U.S. Pensions. As a result, the IEM approach was to do an ISP for each unit, plus one for Corporate & Investments. I ran the ISP for Corporate as a trial of the process, and I and a James Martin consultant did manage to get the senior VP and his reports in a room for a day and do some models and prioritizations. That senior VP eventually became President, and he always remembered who I was whenever we met (it was not a huge company, so it was possible to see senior management around now and then).

Meanwhile, one business unit was chomping at the bit to go. It was Canada Pensions and it was the part of the business whose time for a new system had come. I can't recall if they looked for packages first, or if they really did an ISP, but they were soon off to do their data model, function decomp, got down to doing Action Diagrams. They had people go to IEF training, had a few experienced consultants come on.

Then the "while" I mentioned in my last post came to an end...

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About Me

Ontario, Canada
I have been an IT Business Analyst for 25 years, so I must have learned something. Also been on a lot of projects, which I have distilled into the book "Cascade": follow the link to the right to see more.