Tuesday 27 October 2009

Bullhorn implementation in the UK - The Final Week

The last few days have been a blur and it never stops amazing me that it is the little things that catch you out in any Project Go Live. Thanks to the team involved, you know who you are and I am proud of you all.

So now the diary of the Go Live week, boring but true!

Monday T-7 days and Training Begins
- Start face to face training, everyone is getting at least 8 hours of training in 3 or 4 sessions covering Navigation, Resourcing, Perm or Contract work flow

Tuesday T-6 days and Training continues, Data cut off day
- The client made its last changes to their existing system on Tuesday night at 5pm, their existing server is was so slow and the files were 14Gb so we had to take a server on site, copy the data and take it to Kamanchi Towers
- We could run some data cleaning scripts on the system before we initiated the data extraction. We cut back on companies, contacts, jobs and candidates to raise the quality of the data.
- We took about a third of the data out and left the scripts running over night.

Wednesday T-5 days and Training continues and Data checked and sent to Bullhorn - We started the extraction routines at 10 in the morning and by 2pm we had uploaded the data to the Bullhorn ftp site.
- A sanity check by Clint shows that the CV extraction had missed about 38k records.
- A really good spot and with the time working in our favour we sorted it by 1800 and still on track for our upload slot.

Thursday T-4 days and its the last day of training
- The contract work flow in Bullhorn is its weak spot, it doesn't flow well and the teams don?t like it, it didn't help as we didn't have the Contract documents ready in time, so not a good finish to the training. Kamanchi are working with Bullhorn to improve this for the UK market.
- Hand over the system to Clint to extract the data. Issue identified at 22.01 with the Jobs files sent, new version sent over by 22.19 (result)

Friday T-3 days and its training test day and data checking day
- We receive an email at 3am to say the data load is finished and we are good to check it.
- First look only shows 58 records (only 45k short) Oh my god lets wait till Clint gets in, I am sure it is something easy.
- The training test is finalised and then pass mark set at 80% (I only got 50% in the first draft, some words and answers need to be checked). Well done AN for getting the top mark 86%.
- Clint gets in to the office and reruns an index, now we have 45k candidates and the data testing can begin a day earlier than planned.
- By Close of Play we are done and everyone who was going to work the weekend is stood down (except me), the data looks good, the record counts work and it just needs sense checking.
- The biggest issue is with candidate cv's that we cant do anything about where they haven?t populated the preview window in the candidate overview. The document is there and it can be searched fine.
- The PST files from Outlook fail to move over the wire and we have missed our slot, so no email on Monday then.

Saturday T-2 day and no rest for the wicked
- The morning is spent organising offices to be opened, drives to be carried and uploaded to the Bullhorn ftp site so we still have a chance of getting the mail in for Live
- Our UAT at the client is having problems with his Internet connections so, sign off is on the phone. I love a client who trusts us enough to say go.
- Ready for the system to move in to live tomorrow, good job


Sunday T-1 day and a quiet Sunday until....
- I try the live site at 12.43, errors at login! And a candidate search returns no results!
- It is going to be one of those days, its at times like this we all earn our money and at 23.06 on Sunday we are good to go in live.

From Kick off to Live in 12 weeks, from agreed Scope to Live in 7 weeks.

Now we just have to get the client to remember how to use it!