I read a quote somewhere “The middle of every successful project looks like a mess.” or something to that effect.

I suppose the projects where the beginning, middle and end are a mess are the ones you need to watch out for.

Right now we are in ramp up of the maintenance/support teams at a big project in the Nordics. We are facing a year of mixed mode operations, where we have production operations and the phased rollout to new locations in parallel.

The support team supports, and the deployment team deploys.

As usual the assumption right up to about a month or so before initial go-live was that the deployment team would carry the support.

Not!

Consequently we had a last minute scramble over the Christmas/New Year to fire up a support/maintenance team.

While it is a bit messy and not perfect – the quality of the mess (I mean scramble) is not so bad. Weekly operational review with the operational delivery managers, written issue lists and assigned actions, candid discussions getting the problems on the table and documented, issues getting solved and moved off the table.

So while the middle of a project might look like a mess (even the start) it is methodical use of project management tools of checklists and scheduled communication points that are helping us navigate out of the mess and bring it all under control.