"We decided we needed a couple more months to finish, even though thenext opportunity to go live was the Christmas shutdown," said Girgis."That was a very difficult time because we felt if we postponedanother five months we would lose some of the team members, who hadalready been putting in long hours. And because we were so close toimplementation, the knowledge that these people had would have beenvery difficult to replace."

Fortunately, the team commitment was so high that all but a couple ofpeople chose to stay.

Meanwhile, it was necessary to get to the root of the problems thathad caused the project to fall behind. The company brought in animpartial consulting firm to audit the project. In a project of thissize, several hundred business processes had to be redefined and theaudit found that several were not completely closed. This made thetask of doing the data conversions and moving forward with integrationtesting difficult.

"It's like you're trying to convert master data and these complexthings around jelly which keeps on changing shape every week," saidMacFarlane.

Understanding the problem, however, was only the first step in gettingon track. Solving it was a much bigger hurdle, and that's where seniormanagement played an invaluable role.