CIO —
CASE 1 A Portal to Nowhere
The developer: Kent Odland, technical manager at Federal Express.
The project: A B2B portal for the parcel delivery industry.
The damage: More than $15 million over four years.
In 1994 FedEx conceived of a massive B2B supply chain automation system that would link order information and inventory, among other systems, in real-time. The system would link all parcel companies with all their customers, partners, banks and suppliers in real-time. In 1996 the project broke virtual ground. Then, one day in 1998, the approvals?for equipment and for consultants?just stopped.
"That’s when I sort of knew it was over," says Odland, the portal’s technical manager. "Things just dragged. It starts with talk like, ’Maybe we could use this internally,’ or ’We ought to think about how to redirect this effort toward something else.’"
The project limped on for another quarter until its director and chief architect finally resigned. Most of the development team followed, and eventually, FedEx was out of the portal business without ever finishing the software.
Odland’s blame pie reflects three key reasons why the project collapsed.
Sponsor apathy. Odland remembers his team members selling C-level executives on the idea for the portal. They gained high-level sponsors by convincing management that the software could create new revenue streams.
But they forgot to continue selling them. "We didn’t even get a real live customer as a reference. So the sponsors don’t hear from us, don’t have anything to endorse or anyone to endorse it," Odland says. "At some point they just decided it was costing more than any revenue it promised to bring in."
Developers’ bad attitude.
Executive myopia. Sales executives blanched at the prospect of running a portal that was open to the competition. But up in the developer’s ivory tower, that was crucial to the platform’s success. Apoplectic sales executives demanded the programmers change it to a company-only B2B exchange. To Odland, that sounded strikingly like the supply chain they already had and were trying to improve upon.
"It was too radical for them," says Odland. "What we ended up with was a bunch of great ideas for software without any real-life input."
The Agile Analysis
In theory, Agile Development is supposed to bring the business experts and the developers closer together. In this FedEx project, they were miles apart?literally. Odland was in Dallas, 1,000 miles from FedEx’s Memphis, Tenn., headquarters.
Early on, the project’s funding seemed to be unlimited. Minimal budgeting would have forced Odland to demonstrate the project’s merits to business experts before his budget was simply cut off.
