01 · Presales & kickoff · The week's promise
The week three departments all say they are the most urgent
At kickoff the project manager writes the decision owner down. He owns sequence, not packing every menu into the same week. Whether over-receive is allowed, and which system keeps the books, are not his to change.
- Monday Align scope. Verbally added needs go through a change form. Unsigned ones do not enter this week's development.
- Tuesday Align dependencies. Master data, old-system accounts, sample documents the customer must supply — which item will stall a named person.
- Wednesday Align the demo. Which real-structure document the business will walk, written on the week plan. Not “see progress”.
- Thursday Align risks. Environment, the old system running in parallel, the acceptance person travelling — every item has a name and a date.
- Friday Align the promise. What is said as done to the customer must match the states actually in the build.
The project manager runs the whole stretch, and does not make each specialist's decisions
In kickoff week the project manager writes the decision owner onto paper. From survey through acceptance the work then moves on that same scope. The mark of the role is not how many meetings are held. It is that any sentence “you can see it this Friday” can be translated into: which document, which state, who clicks, and whose problem it is if the click fails. A promise that cannot be translated, he takes back that day. He does not leave it until Friday for the business to stare at an empty menu.
He does not decide whether over-receive should be allowed. That rule is already written by requirements and product. He does not decide that item codes stay in Kingdee. That boundary is already signed on the proposal. What he decides is: development does not start while the rule is still unclear; integration does not start while the boundary is still unsigned; the customer is not told go-live while testing has not signed off. Who has the right to add scope back is written on paper in kickoff week. A common form: the business owner may raise it, the product manager judges whether it enters phase one, and anything over the agreed effort must be signed by both the customer and the DaXi Technology project manager. “Add it while you're at it” in the group chat is not an instruction.
How a week avoids three departments all being the most urgent
If Monday's change forms exceed three, this week's plan is already dishonest. The project manager splits them into three classes: already affecting the document in progress, can wait for the next iteration, needs the customer to supply material. Only the first class takes this week's development. Tuesday he chases not “is the interface done”, but whether the customer has handed over sample documents and test accounts. An interface without samples can only use fake data. Friday's demo will be called unlike. Wednesday's demo person must be the person who will operate it every day later, not only the IT lead. Thursday he turns risks said in the meeting into dated actions: if the account is not opened by Friday, the demo moves to next Wednesday — not “keep following up”. Friday the sentence he repeats to the customer must be findable as the same sentence in the test record.
Machine shop: the board is loud. The job ticket is daily
Production, quality, and sales all wrote shop-floor reporting, defect codes, and a customer board as must-have for go-live. All three department heads said they affected acceptance. The project manager did not take a vote. He asked each person to bring one document from yesterday. Production brought a job ticket. Every machine has one every day. Quality brought a handwritten defect ticket, which has to be recorded on the shift. Sales brought an Excel board only summarised on Friday afternoon, with data from the previous four days of WeChat. Frequency differed by an order of magnitude.
Phase one therefore kept only reporting and defects. The board went into a change. The reason was not that it was unimportant. It was that it had no daily operator, and its data source would not exist until reporting was stable. The sales director signed the change, confirming acceptance did not include the board. On go-live day nobody used a missing board to reject acceptance. If the three “musts” had sat in the plan side by side, reporting states would not have been finished, the board would have been padded with hand numbers, and acceptance would have stuck on a screen that should never have entered phase one.
The project manager hands the decision record to the Delivery manager. From then the delivery manager collects evidence against this scope only, and does not close on meeting feel. Dependencies on the engineering schedule go to the matching engineer, but an engineer may not privately promise the business extra fields. If they did, the project manager has to turn it into a change, or cancel it in the open.