Guy Hamblen had the unenviable task of following the “show” put on by Dick Rutan (one of only 2 pilots to fly nonstop around the world) and Brian Binnie (one of only 3 pilots to fly into and back from space).

Listen to Guy’s entire presentation at the iRise conference (Time: 49 minutes].

But Guy works for “Brown” and he was up to the task. Guy is a 20-year veteran and project manager in the Advanced Technology Group at UPS and he discussed how UPS rolled out an enterprise implementation of iRise over 6 months.

First, Guy provided us with some background on UPS. UPS was founded 100 years ago by 2 guys in Seattle as a courier business. Today, UPS has 427,700 employees and $47.5 B in annual revenue. They deliver 15.6mm packages per day to 7.9 million customers and serve more than 200 countries. They also run the world’s 8th largest airline.

From an IT perspective, UPS is also huge. They have an annual IT budget of $1billion. They run 2 data centers, 15 mainframes, 2300 mid-range computers, almost 8800 servers and 81,000 handheld computers. They handle 15 million tracking requests and track 97,500 vehicles.

UPS adopted a fast track adoption process for iRise. The Advanced Technology Group was tasked with the implementation and process plan – and an exit strategy. They conducted weekly conference calls with business unit champions which enabled them to hear issues first hand – and empowered champions with idea of getting it done and removing roadblocks. Another key was that they centralize processes for control and rapid decision making.

The UPS success factors included:

• Focused on training – including a “just in time” training approach that trained iRise users just before their use of iRise
• Developed SME’s within each business unit as first point of contact
• Created a virtual iRise Center of Excellence to store artifacts like best practices, reference materials, tutorials, quick start guides, etc.
• Established an iRise Internal User Group
• Held each business unit responsible for collecting ROI success metrics for each project

UPS currently has 7 business units actively using iRise for simulation. In first 6 months of implementation, over 45 projects used iRise. There are 350+ registered iRise users and more than 50 managers and stakeholders have received an iRise roadshow presentation. More than 150 BAs took the formal 2-day training course and 50 took advanced iRise training.

Guy also identified what UPS learned in the process. One of the keys was centralizing the early adoption process for control and agility. CIO and senior management support was also critical to rapid adoption. They are continuing to evangelize the product at every opportunity with the goal to have awareness of iRise at all levels.

UPS ran across some “snakes in the grass” too

• not all BAs can use iRise and not all applications can be modeled

• BU managers loved the tool, but some project managers pushed back

• using iRise also raised some questions such as what’s best — high or low fidelity and how to define the metrics?

UPS decided to leave it up to the project team to decide how far to take the fidelity. They also decided that a defect becomes a defect only after sign-off of the iDoc with the business unit.

Going forward, UPS will continue to foster an iRise community through wiki’s, blogs and forums. They will continue to evangelize the product and maintain a continuing program which they feel is essential to maintain momentum.