The challenge
American Greetings — the Cleveland-based greeting card company — was three years into a two-year project. The goal: integrate the mainframe Order Management System at its Cleveland headquarters with a new order-packing system at its distribution center in Arkansas. Two systems, two states, one critical path through the business.
By the time we were brought in, the team had just delivered hard news to leadership: a fresh estimate of two more years. A two-year project was on track to take five, with no guarantee the next estimate would hold any better than the last.
What we did
We didn’t propose a rewrite, and we didn’t add a small army. We reviewed what was actually there — the requirements, the architecture, and the software built to date — and looked for the few things that were genuinely holding the project back.
From that review came a focused set of recommendations: a handful of adjustments to the architecture, and a small set of software-development patterns for the team to follow from there. Senior judgment applied to the right places, rather than effort sprayed across all of them.
The outcome
The project went live six months later — against a re-estimate that had called for two more years. It went on to win American Greetings’ internal Chairman’s Award, the company’s highest recognition, for being such a success.
The telling detail is the gap between “two more years” and “six months.” The work was never five years of work. The plan and the architecture were off — and once the right few things were corrected, a stalled project turned into an award-winning one.