E. Technical

• MIS needs to provide databases as described above, back them up regularly, provide roll back/restore capabilities and/or services, adequate equipment and support services.
• Provide help with batch job streams.
• Continuing MIS CRP participation in providing technical and applications support will help ensure favorable results. Technical consultants, software and hardware vendors can play an important role here as well.

F. Operational Phase

There are many ways to organize the CRP activities. Here’s a good one:

• Functional leaders direct construction of as-is and to-be flows, identify issues.
• Team works on prioritization, assignment and resolution of identified issues.
• CRP administrator does an informal run through of system flow charts, trial runs the software on-line and develops a “story line” to guide the scenarios to be written.
• CRP administrator lays out overall CRP plan and schedule.
• CRP administrator lays out CRP scenario guidelines. Keep test cases small. You want a good cross section of products, processes and organizations involved, not a massive data entry exercise.

Functional leaders construct detailed functional scenarios using guidelines, own knowledge of functions, issues list and advice from system users, managers and other legitimate interested parties. Others review and augment this product.

Functional leaders walk cross-functional teams and potential system users through flow charts. Issue handling is discussed. Leaders take group through on-line scenario exercises. Various questions and additions to the foreseen problems are raised and alternative approaches are tested. Most issues should be resolved by the team during the exercises or delegated for further action. Occasionally, issues will be referred to the steering committee when the group is unable to resolve them. This should be unusual if the group composition is correct and they are empowered to address most issues. It is advisable to have had at least some of the vendors software training and certainly "generic" or industry-specific education before attempting these steps.

It's a good idea to do the walkthroughs and resolve most issues on paper first, before starting the computer simulation. Why: Too hard to keep reloading the database, re-doing exercises and resetting parameters all the time.

Don’t be afraid to try ad-hoc approaches to issues encountered. If worried about contaminating the database by deviating from the tried and true, try tests under different contracts, parts, accounts, or even on a separate database. This is one of the reasons we recommended having a “play" database earlier.