From a newsletter

ICI is a client from UK resources OG. The scope in short is about delivering internal shared service centers in UK, China and US (Note: US already in operation) with PeopleSoft HR and Helpdesk 8.9 as the supported platforms. The first release covers 12 countries with USA, UK and China as the first to go live and follow by the rest of the 9 countries.

As the manager for technology functional work stream, I was given the task to define the scope of the application and the roll-out timing, estimating the resources and performing endless of calculation using ADM Estimator from the start. Shortly after that, the team is staffed with PeopleSoft resources starting with a UK HP French colleague Anouk Nawfal, followed by Mr. Recruiting and Ms. Helpdesk from the Dutch GBS organization. We also have a Swedish resource for a few weeks. Despite it being a UK project, I proudly present a team which consists of different nationalities except British.

We had some hectic and busy moments during the blueprint and country workshops preparation, a steep learning curve for the team in understanding ICI requirements and doing the mapping to the system functionality and identifying gaps at the same time. It was also a challenge to organize a blueprint workshop with participants from all over the globe such as Europe, US and Asia within 2 weeks notice and also having the country workshop starting at the same time as the blueprint workshop.
However, Ms HelpDesk and I delivered a successful and sounding blueprint workshop that impressed the client. Meantime, Ms French covered the UK backwater in Slough, while Mr Recruiting was exodus to USA for 3 weeks to cover the USA requirements. Finally I was sent to Shanghai to ‘battle’ the China workshop.

By the end of July, ICI announced the decision to standardize the IT and application platform throughout the business and the choice of the enterprise application is SAP. As a result of that, ICI is indeed ‘game over’ for all the PeopleSoft resources, but the new horizon has just begin with SAP.

We are at the final stage of transition and knowledge transfer, ensuring the SAP team captures the knowledge. All PeopleSoft resources would have been all rolled-off by the time you received this newsletter.

Set asides of all these, the project location was top, just off the bustling Oxford Street. I personally enjoyed the frequent window shopping at Selfridges; Ms. Helpdesk spent most of her time visiting the West End musicals (she's seen more than 10 musicals this year alone!). Mr Recruiting obviously enjoyed the hip and expensive London lifestyle too (counting the Ferraris/ Lambourghinis/ Porsches each day).