IT project experience - establish CMS for exchange program

While working for the Japanese Consulate in Vancouver, I coordinated a project to establish a Contents Management System for an exchange program run by the Japanese government. The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program was established some 20 years ago by the government, and it has been recognized as a very successful program in promoting cultural exchange between Japan and more than 40 countries in the world. The program invites foreign youth to Japanese municipalities to experience Japanese culture and to teach foreign languages at Japanese public schools every year. From Vancouver, about 100 Canadian university graduates are annually sent to Japan on the JET program. The program aims to promote the understanding of Japan at a grass-roots level in foreign countries.

In fact, among the past JET participants, there are a quite few who have become quite successful in the fields of business, education, and politics, in their home countries. However, the Japanese government has done a poor job of maintaining contact with these former participants. Recently, losing contact with past JET participants has been recognized as a great loss for the program. Under such circumstances, the government decided to establish a CMS as a tool to keep a bond with the past, present, and future JET participants around the world. The CMS will contain all the contact information of the JET participants and connect the web pages of the JET alumni association as well as those of the Japanese municipalities and government. After almost two years of debate on the project in Tokyo, the budget was finally approved for establishing a CMS. Since the IT vendor, which was a company owned by one of the of JET alumni, is located in Vancouver, I happened to be assigned to coordinate this project.

Although the project looked fairly simple at the beginning, the completion was delayed and was more than a half year behind schedule. The main reasons for the delay were the legal aspects associated with the project and the difficulty of managing the IT vendor relationship. On the legal side, we had to consider a number of issues, such as the location of the server and protection of personal information. We had to understand when we set up a server for the CMS in Vancouver, what kind of legal impact it would have on the users who are in different countries. We had to also be concerned with how much privacy protection was to be given to personal information in the CMS. Since neither the IT vendor nor I had any experience in similar projects, we almost had to learn everything from scratch. The IT vendor and I consulted lawyers, and it took more than three months before we understood the legal environment and agreed on the basic framework of the project.

Managing the IT vendor was also extremely difficult in this project. This small IT company, run by a JET alumnus, had been involved in this project from two years ago. This company spent a lot of time and resources debating with the Japanese government even before I got involved in this project. When I began working with this company, their motivation level was very low. Further, due to budget constraints, the government said from the beginning that they could not pay competitive fees to this company. Thus, this project work always remained low in the IT vendor’s priority list. This made it so difficult for me to deliver the result by the scheduled deadline. I was always going back and forth between the government office in Tokyo and the IT vendor to make progress on the project. Finally, after two years, the CMS was released with an eight month delay in the schedule.

I found this project a very tiring experience since I had no choice but to work with an unenthusiastic vendor and a limited budget. I always had to worry about the payment schedule since the budget for each quarter could not be carried over to the next quarter under the special budget allocated for this project, but I never knew when the vendor would be able to show us the scheduled partial deliverables in each quarter. I felt many times that there was no way to complete the project. After everything was over, looking back, I wonder if I could have gained more management buy-in on this project. This seemed impossible at that time, since my direct supervisor was extremely busy with something else and did not have interest in this project. As there was not any strong support from the Tokyo office, I felt this project was imposed on me only because the vendor was in Vancouver. After all, not only myself but the people who worked for me and the IT vendor had a very hard time throughout the duration of the project. If I had a similar opportunity in the future, I hope I could have more buy-in from top management and effective support in order to better manage the project.