On the 26th of April our Transition Team received an e-mail saying:
“We finally have the contract signed from MMG!”
You will say – why is this so special? Well, because it was quite the journey to get here! Here is a story from one of our transition managers about a long and hard road, and reaching the destination through overcoming challenges and working as a team!
Everything started in the early winter of 2017, when the MMG project was given to the Transition Team form our AGS sales squad – already at the beginning this project was announced as a challenging one due to a very tight project timeframe, high expectation from the customer, some technical challenges and the fact that the team needed to prove themselves prior to the customer signing the contract.
At first, this seemed like a big headache and quite unrealistic to achieve in the set timeline, however after putting a lot of effort in setting a stable Project Plan the Transition team together with the account manager Andreas Grønnevik were ready to meet Møller IT for the first time in their main office in Norway. After a really productive 2 day workshop where AGS collected all of the required information and most important agreed on all tasks, milestones and the scope of achievements to get the contract signed.
As time was very limited the Transition Team made the decision to focus on quality and split the project into two parts:
- The first one – implement all baseline of agreed services: Image Management, Distribution System Management, Driver Management, Application Management, Patch Management, Group Policy Management and Service Delivery Management; Also agree on all standard procedures and processes, establish a communication and ticket flow, and collect all required documentation to be ready for Operations;
- The second part – extend the full scope of services, servers and clients to start production: 144 Distribution Point Servers and 6000 client devices.
As soon as the Transition Team got back from the workshop in Oslo they started to work on the first part of the project – during the first 3 weeks there was already a 2 week delay in the project plan due to some issues on the customer side, but our team stayed strong as they wanted to show their best and win the contract and after resolving all of the issues they didn’t give up and put the work in to catch up the timeline. After working day and night the team got back on track resulting in finishing the first phase as expected and more. At this point the customer was very satisfied and delighted with the delivered services and the implementation quality.
However this was not the end of the story – the customer still wanted to see how AGS would implement the second phase prior to signing the contract.
The first thing in the last project phase was to extend the implemented services, what meant that AGS needed to prepare all of the driver packages and applications. The pressure was on, but still the AGS team managed to finish everything in planned time and with flying colors. But then came time to encounter the technical challenges mentioned at the beginning – for the first time in AGS history we needed to prepare and deliver 144 Distribution Points to several Møller dealer sites and offices throughout Norway, Sweden and all 3 Baltic countries!
The first challenge was to prepare automatic deployment scripts for several preparations, the second one was to decide how to prepare 144 is such a short time and the third – to deliver the out that time-frame.
Once again back to the drawing board – a lot of time on schemes and procedures, facing several logistic issues and concerns with a lot of involved parties. But, no matter – the employees of AGS are resilient – a meeting with all of the stakeholders, a trip to Oslo to present the solution and AGS gets the green light to proceed with the plan.
The First Distribution Point was delivered to Riga – to get it into production the project team supported by the MMG account manager Andreas Grønnevik had one more workshop with Møller, this time in the AGS office and the Møller office in Riga! The customer was really excited about our work and the progress!
Once AGS had this first Distribution Point in place, the project team got the green light to proceed with all others, but the big think – WE GOT THE CONTRACT SIGNED!
Now this doesn’t mean that everything is over – everyone is still working hard to get all of the other servers delivered to their target locations. And we all are waiting for the official Go-Live date in June.
This just shows that by having a dedicated and motivated team you can achieve anything and overcome even the toughest challenges!