Given the heterogeneous environment of the Indian Railways, even the thought of attempting a project on this scale can give the most experienced project manager the jitters. The CMS concept demanded that over 350 kiosks be connected and over 1,000 data-entry nodes be provided. In its first phase, the project is linking 144 crew-booking points spread across nine zones and 30 divisions in central, western, and north India. "Before we decided to roll out the CMS in its full strength, we thought it was necessary to conduct a few pilots with zonal divisions. The rules for the CMS were consolidated from what cannot really be called a pilot project but more a proof-of-concept (POC) exercise," says Ganju.

While designing the software, the team consulted with railway staff from all over India. They found huge differences in practices and a lack of common standards. During the development stage, the team at CRIS ensured that the software could accommodate these variations, including language. "In the future, we will have more languages added to the system so that the crew belonging to different regions can use the system easily," says Ganju.

The outlines of the pilot were defined based on the feedback from the POC. Members of CRIS acknowledge that the POC exercise was not very successful, but the experience and the issues it brought to light would take phase one a long way. "Based on this experience, we designed and conceived the pilot project, which started with the Ratlam and Baroda divisions," says G.K. Maishi, group GM/OAEW, CRIS. But when you're among the largest employers in the world, even pilots are sizeable. In its first phase, the project targeted 35,000 railway workers.

Although this forms a small percentage of the total number of railway employees, the buy-in of this group was essential if the project was to take off. But they had been weaned on the manual system and in some cases the manual system went back to the days of their fathers. They had learnt to work the system and were not ready to adopt systemic changes. The biometric readers, for example, made it impossible for them to sign in by proxy.

"Change management is a challenge we have faced in every project that we have done for the Indian Railways. We have overcome this by designing applications properly so that everyone who interacts with a system benefits from it. There are IT implementations in which the people who interact with a system do not benefit at all. Not so with the CMS," says Vikram Chopra, Director Operations, CRIS.