LIMS / ELN IMPLEMENTATION PREPARATION
A holistic approach
Initial agreement on the project scope
At the beginning of a new LIMS implementation project, before any work begins, our team needs to gain a basic understanding of the problem the lab wants to solve. We ask questions, such as:
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Why is the lab doing this LIMS integration?
What are the lab’s long-term plans?
Does the lab have any hard deadlines?
What are the lab’s budgetary constraints?
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It’s important that everyone involved in the project (the lab’s stakeholders and our team) agree on this sizing — if we cannot reach a consensus, we need to re-evaluate and discuss the project goals until everyone is on the same page. Based on this sizing, we provide an initial rough estimate of what the project will cost.
Once we have an agreement on the high-level scope of work and the sizing, we generally recommend proceeding with a discovery phase or pilot project. During this phase, we can gain a better understanding of the lab’s unique requirements and thus both manage risk and fine-tune our estimate of the cost.
Discovery phase
Our goal during the discovery phase is to document the lab’s detailed requirements, provide a high-level implementation design, and create estimates for the total implementation (with a factor of plus or minus 25%). We write recommendations and/or requirements in a vendor-neutral way so that the lab can go with its implementer of choice. These requirements give us insights into the full scope of the project and enable us to provide a more accurate estimate, as well as place boundaries around areas of risk.
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Deliverables
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A kickoff meeting for our team to meet key stakeholders and discuss the lab’s goals.
Two one-hour collaborative working sessions per week. During these sessions, our team maps the workflows and related processes at a high level, usually diagrammatically, and defines a strategy for the work. In some cases, we also provide proof-of-concept demonstrations.
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A detailed discovery report that includes the goals of the project, recommendations for configurations and customizations needed to model all processes, and estimates of the resources and time needed to accomplish these goals and an implementation design. This report can vary in length from 50 to 150 pages and captures the minute details of the lab’s implementation requirements.
On average, this phase takes approximately 80–150 hours to complete, depending on the size of the project. This may sound like a lot of hours, but this is a critical phase and helps to remove project risk and budget surprises. We find it helpful to frame this expenditure to business stakeholders as the percentage of the total expected budget that is for critical risk management. Typically the discovery phase runs to 10% of the then-known total project cost — a high-value activity for a relatively low cost.
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A secondary benefit of the discovery process is that it allows the lab to reassess the merits of the project. In rare cases, the discovery process uncovers the fact that the integration goals are either not technically feasible or not possible within the budget or schedule. It’s more economical to figure this out within the first 10% of the budget than in the later stages when considerably more has been spent.
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