The middle age crises
Pilot Project The pilot was intended to meet several requirements. The primary objective
was proof of concept. The pilot included the conversion of a 50 square mile area of our
service territory. A demo application was developed, at the same time, which could meet
the requirements document qualifications. Issues related to conversion were addressed
and a general plan for conversion was developed. At the end of the pilot the potential of
the system was demonstrated for the user community and senior management. The
project was given approval.
Begin Data Conversion Data conversion began in a relatively small and rural operating
area comprising an area of approximately 300 square miles and 100,000 customers. This
area was chosen for several reasons including availability of digital kmdbase, availability
of digital facilities’ data, interest of area management in digital mapping, its relatively
small size, and generally rural makeup. Conversion processes, partially worked out
during the pilot, were completed and initiated at this time. This process required
considerable attention to perfect in an interactive process that lasted through the
conversion of the next operating areas converted.
Adjustments Data acceptance and data quality assurance processes were also
developed at this time. This process was hampered by a lag in application development.
We had converted data coming back from the conversion vendor that our application was
not capable of adequately reviewing. This was one of the first unforeseen problems that
required adjustments to our development plan. The earliest converted data eventually
was reconverted to correct problems that could not be seen when it was initially
delivered. As described below, we were forced to attempt to accelerate development of
portions of the application that would facilitate data acceptance.
Development Application Tools for Data Acceptance and C)uality Assurance The first
identified requirement for the application in the project cycle was data acceptance. A
demo application had been developed for the proof of concept portion of the pilot. The
intention was to discard this demo to start application development based on needs of a
production environment and the requirements document.
Adjustments As described above we did not anticipate the need to have this portion of
the application in place during the early phases of data conversion. Unfortunately, time
pressures and the arrival of data forced us to recycle some of the code from this demo
application. We used the code as a starting point to build the data acceptance tool we
very badly needed.
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