97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 11. Save Money on Your Issues

PMP. Randy Loomis

OUR COMPANY WAS USING TRAINING SOFTWARE that was five upgrades behind. We reached the point where it was so out of date that the vendor would no longer support it. Our project consisted of working with the vendor to upgrade our training software to the latest release, and then to train our users to use the newest version.

We developed two statements of work, one that outlined the user training agreement and one that delineated a "not-to-exceed" cost for applying the upgrades to our old training software. After obtaining a copy of our data, the vendor began the process of remotely developing and testing the scripts^[6] necessary to begin converting the data and applying the first of the upgrades.

Once the scripts passed vendor testing, they were migrated to our development environment where we performed user tests. This process was repeated as we added each of the five subsequent upgrades. While doing testing, we would document any issues that we encountered, then we retested those issues once the vendor had rewritten and retested their original scripts.

While working through each of the upgrades, the vendor's hours, multiplied by the billing rate established in the statement of work, were tracked against the "not-to-exceed" budget. As we progressed through the upgrades, we discovered bugs in the application upgrades themselves that ...