Week 1 Progress Report - Meg Gross - Project Management

 

Admin Stuff:

Hours Worked This Week: 65 (plus an over night project on 04/09)

Total Hours Worked This Quarter: 65 + Special Project on 04/09

Current Work Load:

Project Packing Boxes: Global Data Center Migration for our company & 17 clients: Consolidating all of our data centers for all of our clients in to 3 main data centers 

Project Everest: Ramp for 500 agents for a Healthcare Client 

Project Cotton Candy: Closing out a project for an Outbound Dialer program - still have 4 weeks of efforts remaining

Expected Progress This Week vs. Actual Progress:

Project Packing Boxes:  

This week was a pivotal week for this project.  We have to be out of our main data center by June 30th of this year so client engagement, ordering equipment and executing upon the internal efforts we need to do in order to be ready to receive the clients circuits and equipment and connect them to our newly migrated network.  When the week began we had 14 of the 17 clients engaged with a goal to get the other three to come to the table and begin discussions and hopefully commit to executing circuit/equipment orders; and i was able to do just that.  We can confirm with the week closing out that 17/17 of our clients are engaged with equipment orders in progress.

Another major effort that we as a team were prepping for is the planning and scheduling of activities for our rack move this weekend.  We are going to be moving our existing rack in our main data center to our new data center rack locations.  I have lead daily meetings both internally with our IT team and with external vendors to ensure our schedule of activities are outlined.  By the end of today we have a schedule of events that will begin on 04/09 at 2130 and go until efforts are completed on Sunday.

Project Everest:

Licensed agents are a big part of our business and during what is called "AEP Season" (which means Open Enrolment Season for insurance companies) we work with different companies to hire enough agents, get them trained and on the phones by specific dates.  I am the PM for our largest health care client this year...and we will call them Everest during these updates.  This week I had the expectations of beginning the project plan, hold meetings with functional leaders and complete what we call the "ramp plan" which is the over all scheduled of when all classes will begin training, go in to production and etc.  This week I was able to accomplish all of the items outlined above.  However, this is just the beginning for this effort as this project will be ongoing until December 8th.

Project Cotton Candy: 

In Jan 2022 I started to implement a new client who is using an Outbound Dialer,  and it has been the hardest project that I have ever worked on.  My project manager counter part was OOO this week so there was no expectation for progress or items being completed.  We will pick up efforts next week up on their return.

Issues That Arose:

Project Moving Boxes:  

New rack was set up with Multi-Mode Fiber vs. Single Mode Fiber:  In order to correct this I had to partner with my counter part at the data center and the cabling company we hired to get the resources access to the data center to fix the mistake.  I  was able to do this by mid week which eliminates the risk to our move scheduled for this weekend.

Project Everest: No issues arose this week 

Project Cotton Candy: No issues arose this week 

Expected Progress for Next Week:

Project Moving Boxes: Confirm with all departments that their servers, applications and/or hosted services are up and running post bringing the network down for the rack move.  Also, continue to work with our customers to make strides towards efforts to migrate them to our new network.

Project Everest: Continue with breakout sessions both internally and with our clients.  Finalize scheduling for the season and begin the deep dive in to the project plan and hiring plans.

Project Cotton Candy: Verify that the program is on track and prep the program to hand over to Ops as it is moving in to a steady state vs. implementation.