“Are we There Yet?” Experiences and Lessons in a GIS Conversion Project

Background
City of Tallahassee (COT) staff has spent considerable effort over the last two years converting their electric utility infrastructure GIS from the VISION platform to ArcFM. The project has been a considerable challenge to both COT staff and to the consultant hired to perform the conversion. This paper summarizes the difficulties encountered during this project and offers some of the lessons learned.

COT entered into a contract with the consultant on March 26, 1999. The project schedule called for the entire conversion to be done over seven months. As this paper is being written, some 22 months later, the project is still not finished. The project included conversion of all existing electric GIS data from VISION to ArcFM, creation of custom functionality within ArcFM, and interfacing with an existing custom-built field-based pen computer system. Implicit in this conversion was moving staff from a system they knew and were comfortable with to a newly released system with which they had no experience. The learning curve was steep and because COT runs a lean organization, the work was concentrated on a very few shoulders.

The objective of this paper is to distill the experience COT gained from the growing pains of this conversion into a set of observations other organizations can use to improve the efficiency and productivity of similar projects. The difficulties encountered in an inherited project will be discussed, as well as the actual advantages of coming in to “bat clean-up” on a project. The value of establishing detailed expectations and roles within the entire project team should be clear, yet this relatively simple concept was elusive in practice. Structuring of vendor invoicing/payments, managing subcontractors, establishing clear acceptance criteria, and resolving deadlocks are all critical elements of a large conversion project. What roles did partnership play in this project and how did the partnership evolve over the life of the project? How were issues resolved and what could have been done to improve on this process? Where do we go once the conversion is done? In truth, COT staff’s job has only begun once the conversion consultant has completed its work. The question staff keeping ask is, “Are we there yet?”