technology is to address,” says Karolenko. “It might look great, but you have to be sure you solve the problem you set out to solve.” To help the development team stay on track, “We needed employees who would use the application day in and day out asking if what we were developing would help them do what they needed to do,” he says. “Once those func-tions were in place, we could add bells and whistles later.” ency by having every piece of code the programmers wrote that week reviewed by the rest of the team. Your project should be a team effort—and you hope you’ve built an effective team.” Quick Bridge Funding built the best project team it could and then entrusted the team to work closely with an offshore software develop-ment team. “There were no project heroes,” says Khodaverd-ian. “We didn’t have any one-off programmers who wrote code that no one looked at for a month. We ensured full transpar-9 Ban Project Heroes “Many times we’d encounter a situation where we’d done things a certain way or thought a certain way for a while, and we had to force ourselves to ask why,” says Karolenko. “When we asked why we needed something or why it was important, we were sur-prised at how many things fell away. We realized we had many choices.” n Susan Hodges writes about equipment finance and other business topics from her office in Wilmette, Ill. 10 Keep Asking Why Five Phases of Project Completion Whether the tech/ops project your firm is contemplating is relatively small or imposingly large, follow the steps this year’s winners of the ELFA Operations & Technology Excellence Award took to keep their projects on track and moving toward the finish line. A Start the conversation. What exactly is the problem? What needs to be changed to remedy the problem: equipment and software? Procedures and processes? How will you know that the problem has been corrected? How will you measure efficiency gains? Write it all down, agree on it and commit to it. “Ensure that your basic company and technical architecture support your vision before you begin to build or expand, ” says Hal Hitch, Chair, ELFA’s Operations & Tech-nology Excellence Award Subcommit-tee. “Bring in experts where necessary so you know where to go and what to build. There’s no way around having the expertise. ” B Gather requirements by docu-menting your current system and each job within it. “We went through every department and looked at what every job does, why it’s done and whether it could be automated, combined with another job or made more efficient, ” says Hamlet Kho-daverdian, Vice President, Quick Bridge Funding, LLC. “We spent four months documenting our existing system and creating requirements for the new one. ” D Initiate user acceptance. Release the new system to employees and ask them to use both old and new systems side by side, if possible. Solve problems as they arise. “We spent about a month doing the introduction process, ” says Khodaverd-ian. “We educated every department and supplied written user manuals for the new system. ” C Adopt an agile and modular ap-proach. Then kick off the project. E Launch the new system with full support. When all users are com-fortable, shut down the old system and bring up the new. Says Khodaverdian, “It was truly exciting. We had our entire project team on the floor, showing us-ers what to do if they got stuck. ” “We embedded process engineers and developers in the areas we were working on, ” says John Karolenko, Vice President, Operations Excellence, at Element Financial Corp. “Working module by module, we didn’t need a massive approach. We could show operations people what we were doing and quickly get their feedback. We could reuse code and keep rolling. ” 30 OCTOBER 2015 EQUIPMENT LEASING & FINANCE MAGAZINE