Executive Summary                                                                                                                 5
Project Introduction                                                                                                                8
     Project Overview                                                                                                                9
     Project Assumptions                                                                                                       10
My Project Plan                                                                                                                     13
     Phase I: Project Committee                                                                                              13
     Phase II: Environmental Analysis                                                                                  14
             Unisource’s Current IT Architecture                                                                    14
     Phase III: Recommendations                                                                                          17
     Phase IV: Detailed Cost Summary                                                                                  20
     Phase V: Project Planning                                                                                               24
The Project’s Future                                                                                                             26

Appendix A: Georgia Pacific Specifics                                                                               28
     Company Profile                                                                                                               30
     Georgia Pacific’s Strategic Goals                                                                                   31
Appendix B: Unisource Specifics                                                                                       32
     Unisource’s Current Organizational Status                                                                  33
     Printing and Imaging                                                                                                        33
     Supply Systems                                                                                                                34
     Financial Aspects                                                                                                             34
     Factors Needed for Success                                                                                           34
Appendix C: Unisource’s Current Architecture Chart                                                     35
Appendix D: Georgia Pacific’s Project Cost Summary                                                     37
Appendix E: Project Timeline                                                                                               41
Appendix F: Facilities Table                                                                                                44

Works Cited

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Comparing My Plan

To GP’s Plan

When Georgia Pacific acquired my employer, Unisource, in 1999, an early priority was to unify the Information Systems of the companies. This provided an opportunity for me to prepare a high level plan for the integration that I would then be able to compare and contrast to the actual plan developed and deployed by the Georgia Pacific IT staff.

My IT project will be broken down into phases that will cover the initial planning phase of the project. These phases include:

PHASE I: Forming project committees to oversee and conduct the project

PHASE II: Performing an environmental analysis to determine the status of Unisource’s current technology and determine what we need to migrate to the GP infrastructure.

PHASE III: Making recommendations to the project committee on a basic implementation approach for the project.

PHASE IV: Performing a cost summary using the Huntington, WV division as an example and comparing this summary to the Georgia Pacific estimates.

PHASE V: Sketching a brief project plan that will get the project committee started on the more detailed planning stages necessary to finish the project.

The final portion of my project was to discuss it with the project manager for Georgia Pacific. In talking with Donna Long, IT Manager for Georgia Pacific, I discovered many similarities and differences between my program and GP’s program. The most obvious similarity is the Phased implementation approach and the second major similarity was in the design of the implementation architecture. During our discussion, she and I agreed that these two areas were very important to the success of the implementation plan and the ultimate merger into Georgia Pacific.

Ms. Long and I also discussed the differences between the two plans. The most noticeable area is in the recommendations for implementation. I felt it best to deploy the new architecture across the United States first because there are more facilities, personnel, and customers that would be affected if their technology were not up-to-date. The Canadian and Mexican facilities serve fewer people and will be more difficult to upgrade and therefore will take more time. Also, it is important for GP to quickly present a unified company across the USA to preserve and stabilize its corporate image. Ms. Long says that the GP plan is to split the LAN and WAN issues into two phases, just like my project plan, but to have the Phase B sites completed in 2001 in the United States and replace them with the Mexican facilities for this fiscal year. This is inconsistent with GP’s objectives for several reasons. First, Phase B locations in the United States need WAN connectivity quickly to help promote the GP corporate identity to all U.S. employees as quickly as possible. Second, with GP’s plan, there will be two implementation teams going at the same time. These two teams will be working on technology architectures that are at different maturity levels and will therefore be difficult to track.

Another difference in the two plans is the regional rollout plans for the United States locations. In my opinion, all eight regions should be working at the same time to upgrade their architectures. However, the GP plan calls for a two-year implementation according to the current status of the individual site. I believe that this slower implementation approach will undermine GP’s corporate image in the individual facilities simply because of the time frame involved. Also, the facilities that are completed earlier in the first year may be ready for upgrading again by the end of the two-year time frame and GP will never see the benefit of having all of these facilities on the same system. The directives required by Georgia Pacific as stated in Phase II of my plan will be compromised if they take two years to migrate all of these facilities into their network.