This Datasure project had started life three years earlier as a Financial Services (Investments, Life and Pensions) development for C E Heath, but had never been widely implemented in their 25 branch office regional network. A successor project covering Retail Broking (Personal and Commercial Lines) had been started, based on a conversion from an earlier PC based system, but was also in trouble with its users. In the period since development started, not only had the original users left, but the customer had acquired five more local offices with different existing systems and user requirements.

My role: I was asked by the Datasure MD to help him review the AS/400 systems development project for C E Heath, who was Datasure’s major shareholder. The initial report was completed within 6 weeks, and I was then asked to take over the management of the programme.

There was uncertainty within the Heath UK management team about many issues - could Datasure deliver a complete and workable Retail Broking System, when would it replace the local accounting systems in the offices recently acquired, should the AS/400 computers be deployed at local, regional or central locations? Would it be more cost-effective if they adopted the open market retail broking package already used in some offices? How professional was the software house, were they taking the custom of their parent for granted? When would the software become acceptably bug free, easy to use, and have a fast response time?

After delivering a report identifying the weaknesses and problems of the project, and proposing both a longer term strategy and short term solutions, it was agreed that I should take over the management of the project, which previously had not been treated as a full time role. Crucially, the Datasure MD offered to share some of the development costs of the branch office AS/400 software with the customer in exchange for future software marketing rights.

My actions: I devised a new implementation timetable for both the completion of the Financial Services(FS400) and General Insurance software(GS400), and the roll out to the customer offices in England & Wales.

I reorganised and expanded the 12 man department into separate development and support teams, and changed reporting relationships by redeploying staff in different roles.

The development team was split to support both applications better. The project leaders re-established and prioritised the overall requirements, and evolved the software through a series of user presentations until it met their basic requirements and was sufficiently usable to implement. Parts of the code were rewritten to perform faster, and coding standards adopted.

I encouraged more realistic planning, implemented development quality control standards, created configuration management procedures, and agreed a new service contract with the customer which (amongst many other things) defined the standard PC desktop and regional AS/400 environment. A new central Help Desk service for the branch office environment was established within the software house.

The support team designed the UK wide area network, and connected it to the central customer mainframe accounting system, deployed new and faster AS/400 machines regionally and attached to them PC local area networks, initially DOS and latterly Windows.

We delivered the General Insurance system to the first branch in October 1992, and implemented it in all offices with the improved Financial Services system. We met the target set to implement the AS/400 software throughout England and Wales by March 1994, and then completed Scotland by March 1995.

• There needed to be a long term partnership sharing development costs and rewards
• The project required full time project management by the software house and administrative support by the customer
• The recent acquisition of major brokerages by C E Heath led to changing requirements as the systems were implemented around the branch network
• An evolutionary approach to the development of both the FS400 and GS400 systems was inevitable, and was easy to manage on a branch by branch basis
• Third party software suppliers of specialist desktop products (e.g. pensions calculator) had an important role to play
• There was some difficulty integrating these products into the AS/400 environment properly
• The AS/400 software eventually achieved all the functional requirements, was cost effective and easy to maintain, but it remained relatively user unfriendly
• The management problems of this project were not unique and led to the implementation of a Datasure BSI TickIT Quality Management system