Creating a Culture for Successful IT Projects

In an effort to improve the level of service provided to the citizens of Fulton County, Georgia, increase financial viability, and optimize water and sewer operations, the County determined it necessary to upgrade the Water & Sewer's customer information system and billing system (CIS), and their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to state of the art technologies. The biggest driver for this project was the maintenance of the old mainframe CIS, which were approximately 100,000 per month, but the biggest concern was where people would accept the new systems. On the asset maintenance management side, the water and sewer services crews were primarily working from a paper-based system with a large file folder room to store and manage historical work records. The staff had no reliable tools for analysis, forecasting or workload management. Implementing a new system was going to mean change.At the time of the project start up, the Fulton County Government was also going through several major changes, primarily due to a lack of customer confidence. In the North part of the County, three new cities were formed that completely shook up the County services. In the South part of the County, one city was Fulton County went live with the new billing system and asset management tools on January 21, 2009 and achieved three major successes. The first success was the fact that there were zero billing errors or system defects as a result of the January “golive” event. The second key success was an on-budget on-schedule deployment without any disruption to the customer service or impact on the customer. The third, and most important success of the project, was the way in which the staff at Fulton County embraced the new systems and quickly adapted to the change.formed and two more movements for new cities had started. This caused uncertainty across the staff regarding changes in their job and the workforce.