Development of an Implementation Plan for an Electronic Document Management System in a Global Engineering Firm

Abstract

It is critical that an organization employ a well defined process when deploying an Electronic Document Management (EDM) system. A well implemented EDM system can be a great asset to an organization especially with the proliferation of distributed project teams in project execution. The goal of this field project is to establish such a process for deploying an EDM system, ProjectWise, in Organization X’s Division Y Asia-Pacific offices. This deployment process will be established by developing an implementation plan. To develop the implementation plan, the following research procedures were utilized: documentation review, interviews, and surveys. Since Organization X uses an external IT services provider to develop and manage its IT infrastructure, the research for this field project focused only on the implementation activities that will be performed by Organization X’s internal IT group and did not look at those activities performed by the external IT services provider. The activities that were investigated in this field project include: configuration identification, pilot testing, system roll-out, and training. Recommendations: Based on the findings of the research done for this field project, the following recommendations were made to IT and subsequently included in the implementation plan attached in Appendix A – EDM System Implementation Plan: • Alternative methods of delivering training should be developed to augment web-based training. Live training and recordings of live training were the alternatives preferred most by the survey participants. • Notifications should be issued to end-users after the EDM system has been installed on a workstation. • Templates used to identify configuration items in North America and Europe shall be used in Asia-Pacific. • Since pilot testing is crucial to meeting the overall implementation schedule, potential pilot projects should be selected as early in the implementation process as possible. • Risk factors and proposed mitigations have been identified and included in the implementation plan.