(^22) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Save Money on
Your Issues
Randy Loomis, PMP
Andover, Connecticut, U.S.
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 We reached the point where it was so out of date that the vendor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* nec-
essary to begin converting the data and applying the first of the upgrades.
Once the scripts passed vendor testing, they were migrated to our develop-
ment 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 dis-
covered bugs in the application upgrades themselves that were not related to
the custom scripts written to install the upgrades. We thoroughly documented
each issue, printing screens and providing step-by-step details of what we dis-
covered, and how and where we encountered each issue.
- Script: In computer programming, a program or sequence of instructions that is carried out by a
program rather than by the computer processor. Scripts can be used to control a software applica-
tion without altering the core code of the application.