Shaken To the Core: Walmart Reworked Project Plan after Chilean Earthquake

  Change Management   Risk Management   PM Network  

When I moved with my wife to Santiago, Chile in December 2009 to accept a position as supply chain project manager for Walmart, I was expecting a major challenge. The company was piloting a new technology, and on top of that, I was working in a different culture with a different business environment, different language and different legal regulations.

Despite this, the project went reasonably well for the first two months. The team worked well together, the stakeholders were happy with the progress, and we appeared to be on track to deliver the project on schedule and on budget in June 2010.

All of that changed on the night of 27 February. I woke up in the middle of the night to an 8.8-magnitude earthquake—one of the largest quakes in recorded history.

After making sure that all my co-workers and their families were safe (fortunately, they were), the project team still had a job to do, and our task had just become a lot more complicated.

All special projects were put on hold as Walmart, along with the rest of the country, attempted to get daily life and business back on track as quickly as possible.

Teams worked around the clock to restore infrastructure systems and bring them back online. Because electricity was still out in many parts of the country, we had to use generators. Power use was reserved for core systems and restricted for “…

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