I'll make a long story short, and it will still serve my purposes. I worked on a huge implementation for a Fortune 500 company early in my career and there was a major post implementation crisis that nearly brought the two organizations, the client and the consulting firm, to the courthouse. A technical work unit was completed, tested and signed off on and put into production. The consultant in charge left and so had the project management team. Then it broke, and all hell broke loose. I was troubleshooting the problem and found out that there had been no formal hand-off of the work unit. In other words, the consultant wrote it, the business team tested and signed off, but the client's IT staff had never taken, or been given, ownership of the work. So when it broke there was nowhere to turn. Everyone tried to find someone else to blame. By the time I got pulled in voices were becoming loud and excited. I found the documentation and in about a half hour, working with a technical resource, I found the problem and had it corrected. The 'management' team was still arguing as we moved the changes into production. This was a really good lesson for me. I realized that there is no such thing as a project methodology that can save you; no project plan can support a project team where staff and management have not, on both sides, embraced good, basic values like accountability. The hand-off process was in the methodology book and in the project plan, but wasn't done because no one was accountable and everyone was fine with that until the crisis broke. Doing NetSuite implementations now for small and medium sized companies is refreshing because they are much more focused on action and results over meetings and they are more agile while moving through the implementation. Accountability is not a question; we all take accountability for a successful, completed project. At SightLines Consulting we talk more about project values than project methodologies. Of course we have a roadmap to help guide us on the way, but arriving at a completed, successful project depends more on each project member's character than on the fancy design of the road map. | 
