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Olsten's helpful hints
When a project lasts for three years and involves a revamping of entire systems and networks, it would be easy to understand if things went a little awry or fell behind deadline. That wasn't an option in Olsten's case.
"The thing we had going against us was time," say Jim Harding, Olsten Corp.'s CIO. "We had no time to fail and take major changes of strategy because we had the Year 2000 deadline. We had decided not to remediate and had passed the failsafe point."
One key to staying on track, he says, was good recovery. "Whenever we seemed to run into a Godzilla of some sort, we seemed to be able to pull together, stay fairly calm and focused and overcome it," Harding says.
Another, related key is knowing when to walk away from one course of action and take another.
In early 1998, for example, Olsten experienced a problem with a time-entry application it was using to accept employee time data from an interactive voice response system. "The package was not working and we had invested a lot of money and time," Harding says. "The project was at a complete halt."
The company did an abrupt about-face, ditching the off-the-shelf time-entry package in favor of developing one on its own. In 90 days, Olsten developers delivered the custom-built package and brought the project back on track.
"If we didn't change, we wouldn't have made it," Harding says. "But it gets back to having the right people who can recover."
Giving people incentive to recover helps, of course, and Olsten did that as well. Each member of the project team was eligible for a "fairly serious" bonus that was paid in two parts, one based on each individual's contribution to the project and the other contingent on the entire team completing the project successfully. Harding wouldn't detail the exact amount of the bonuses, but said employees got a significant percentage of their salaries. And this was on top of regular year-end bonuses and salary adjustments.
In the end, Harding says success comes down to two things. One is having strong leadership, meaning managers such as Prill and Loria. The other is giving the leaders something to work with.
"We have the guns. We have strong, competent, technical people who can put in networks, put in databases, build the applications," he says. You've got to have those people or you can't win."
- Paul Desmond
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