Technology DeploymentPartnering For Success

There is no denying that technology is central to our ability to perform our jobs effectively. However, technology does not always arrive neatly packaged ‘with a bow’ ready to use. Every organisation is unique, and this requires the need for configured services to align with company culture and processes. The adoption of new technology into any part of a business, whilst often heralding excitement at the change, can potentially overwhelm those tasked with deployment. It can be a period of intense time-investment, requiring process re-engineering as well as housekeeping tasks, such as data cleansing, in addition to the overall objective of system delivery. Such implementations are often undertaken whilst having to continue to manage the ‘day job’ commitments.

In a 2018, ERP implementation study carried out by Mint Jutras(1), 12% of respondents noted 'poor quality of software' when asked what went wrong during implementation. The top two problems noted during implementation were 'inadequate testing' and 'inadequate business process re-engineering'. These statistics highlight that a successful implementation is not solely dependent on vendor configuration and deployment, but also on the ‘ripple effect’ that deploying technology into the business can have and the need to prepare for this impact.

Signed, Sealed… Now To Deliver

Imagine the scenario. You have just been through a rigorous technology procurement process, with multiple vendors demonstrating their latest features and functionality, each with their own unique selling points. Once through this process, having selected your chosen vendor, you now have to engage the vendor in a contracting process. At this point it would be easy to take your foot off of the pedal, but during this scoping and contracting period you actually have your first opportunity to set the project up for success.

It is important that amid the proformas and legal jargon of service contracts that you clearly articulate and capture the critical success factors for your business. These are typically the features and functionality that the system needs to deliver immediately at go-live. Most technology providers are aiming for the ‘holy grail’ of a standardised implementation, but each client is different and solutions need to fit around the processes and procedures critical to business operations. Some examples - think back to the sales cycle. What were you told could be an additional feature? What user-defined fields and reporting requirements are there specific to your business needs? What functionality did the vendor state is in development and yet to be released? It is critical to really question your implementation partner “Will these features be ready for our go-live?”.

Take The Lead

With the excitement of a new technology platform finally being on its way, it is important to get your team ready and to set realistic expectations about the road ahead. As business processes become more complex, so too can projects where technology is involved. This can be magnified where global teams are involved, with competing requirements across various jurisdictions or business units, varying budgets and a broad range of stakeholders. It is in this period of excitement and readiness that someone, sometimes inadvertently, hands themselves or gets handed, the role of project lead. Often it is the person who also has the deepest subject matter expertise (‘SME’) that is asked to drive implementation requirements, e.g., the Head of Payroll is often nominated as the project lead on a payroll implementation. Once appointed, the project lead becomes the figurehead and central point of contact for everything related to the project.

The role of project lead can very easily become all-encompassing, seemingly without boundaries on where the role starts and stops. More than occasionally a project lead can also assume the role of project manager and “although these positions are often considered interchangeable and they can be assumed by the same person, they are different and each one plays an essential role within a project” (Forbes, 2021 (2)). Clearly defining roles across the whole project is important (see figure 1.1), but particularly at the project lead and project manager level so as to remove any opportunity for confusion as well as the danger of one person taking on too much responsibility and becoming a bottleneck. If the project lead is also a deep technical SME, then it is paramount that this role is clearly ringfenced from that of the project manager and they operate independently for project success.

Setting Your Organisation Up For Success – What Is Within Your Grasp?

Trends are emerging whereby it is recognised that the software itself is often not to blame for failed implementations, rather, points of failure sit outside of the technology configuration (see figure 1.2 (3)).

Building The ‘A’ Team

Successfully implementing a technology solution is a challenge, and the effectiveness of the project team can be a key factor in success. Of course, everyone wants the ‘A’ team, but realistically this isn’t always possible due to competing business demands and priorities, as high-performing employees are often critical to day-to-day operations that also need to continue. The project lead will need to decide where critical SMEs are required and where less experienced team members, who may have greater availability, could be utilised. It is important to also secure longevity in these roles; that is, someone who will see the project through from start to finish.

Work with your implementation partner to really understand roles and expectations, on both sides, in terms of capabilities, time investments and to map the right people to appropriate project roles. Finally, project leaders need to be sensitive to the fact that employees taking up roles in the project team are often asked to continue with responsibilities in their existing roles. A strong project lead will focus on team engagement and morale, setting clear goals and objectives for each team member, whilst highlighting the potential career benefits afforded by their involvement.

Communication Is Key

The Deloitte survey respondents cited “ineffective communications” as the second biggest barrier to a successful technology implementation. We have all heard the phrase “communication is key”, and this is certainly true when it comes to project deployment. The reason for it being cited as a top barrier is likely due to the fact that communication strategies are often significantly underestimated and therefore not appropriately planned for. In some ways this is understandable; we tend to complete our day-jobs informing only those people who really need to know, purposefully removing others from the cc: line of emails to avoid bombarding inboxes. The opposite is true for implementations. We have to remove the tunnel vision glasses and think about all stakeholders, even those who may be considered peripheral to the project, who still need to be informed of headlines and outcomes as they will ultimately be affected by the change. This is where it becomes critical to have a strong, well thought through communication plan that delivers regular and relevant updates for the duration of the project.

At a project team level, remember that not everyone will be a natural communicator. Within the project, regular meetings and channels of communication need to be established to give people the opportunity to share their updates and understand risks and dependencies from other workstreams. Setting up a meeting cadence is one thing, but then the project lead needs to ensure that the commitment to attend is honoured by the project team and that they remain accountable for their input and engagement. All too often, with competing business priorities, team members will, over time, start to reduce their attendance, or limit it to those agenda items they feel are important. Strong governance and ownership are key to ensure this is avoided.

Focussing Project Management On The Right Areas

Many of us will have been exposed to the misguided view that project management is simply “good organisation”. This perspective is inaccurate. Project management requires a specific technical skillset, and is a vocational career choice for many professionals. All too often organisations approach large-scale technology implementations using existing team members who are available to do the role, those in need of a development opportunity, or perhaps, per above, just those who are seen as ‘good organisers’. This person can often hit the ground running, but as overlapping commitments and priorities develop, they may become quickly overwhelmed by multiple ‘spinning plates’. Before you know it, a lack of control around core project management can arise – the linchpin that the rest of the team have been relying on to know what to do, and by when.

What is required from the outset is someone with a strong background and expertise in project management, and an ability to execute a consistent and robust methodology, whilst coordinating areas that may not be in the vendor’s delivery scope, but are important for overall project success. This can include change management, training and ongoing support, and enhancements post go-live.

Your vendor implementation partner will no doubt have a project manager on the team, which may result in a sigh of relief, but this role may be biased towards managing and coordinating items that the vendor is most interested in, e.g. having the system configured by multiple developers and scheduling system refreshes. Thus, the vendor project manager may be less focused on how you are handling key stakeholder engagement or your own change management. Having a strategy to address these equally important areas is critical.

Budgetary And Cost Considerations

What is the cost of purchasing a new piece of technology? One might answer in a literal way, simply looking at software licence costs and vendor implementation costs. There are however, additional technology-related costs, people costs and contingency costs to consider. Contingency costs may be hardest to gain approval for in the original project budget as leadership may anticipate only those tangible hard costs when they sign off. When contracting it is important to give this cost line-item careful consideration to safeguard your project. Scope-creep can indeed ‘creep into’ a project when you least expect it, and project leaders need a mechanism to respond in a way that limits interruption to project milestones and deadlines.

If you expand the scope of the project, e.g., there is an additional third-party vendor requiring an interface, it is more than likely that this will have two critical and fundamental implications – (i) time required to implement will increase, and (ii) the cost from the vendor to the business may increase. This again relates to the point raised on contracting, it is imperative that your implementation partner fully understands your business operations to appropriately scope from the outset. However, if items are later mutually agreed as additional scope, having an accessible contingency fund available in the budget can ease financial pressure and limit detrimental impact on project progress.

1.3

Story from the field…

What's the difference between a successful project and a £100 million mistake? A steering commiXee that works. One electric u:lity company's steering commiXee made all the difference to the success of their technology implementa:on, because they were engaged, were passionate about the program, and were outcomes-focused. The CEO set the tone from the top: he was never late to a mee:ng, never le] early, and always par:cipated. As a result, the rest of the steering commiXee was equally commiXed. In addi:on, each steering commiXee member had an area on the program they were par:cularly passionate about, and developed a set of simple talking points that relayed the tangible benefits of the changes. And when the project hit roadblocks, they were quick to communicate these talking points, to espouse the program charter, and to mi:gate any unproduc:ve dissen:on from business line leaders. Ac:ng as the captain of the ship, the steering commiXee was able to help the program stay its course and achieve impac_ul results.

the project stays aligned with the organisation’s strategic goals, and (iii) that the anticipated return on investment will be realised (see example in figure 1.3 (4)).

Project Management Office (‘PMO’) – That Extra Set Of Hands

The Importance Of Leadership Alignment

Lack of leadership alignment may occur when your key stakeholders do not engage with the project for the long-term. All too often leadership are around in a shortterm capacity; the implementation team get sight of their leadership at kick-off, project close down (and eventual go-live celebrations) and likely during an escalation or two in the middle.

Leadership should be fully onboard with the project and should be active advocates for it, with the understanding that the implementation is critical to business operations. As such, budget support, resourcing and communications all need to echo this.

As part of the project management approach a ‘Steering Committee’ or ‘Project Board’ should be set up. This is a group of influential decision-making executives who take responsibility for (i) ‘steering’ the project to the desired business outcome, (ii) ensuring that

The criticality of getting project management right on your implementation can make-or-break the timelines, cost and overall project success. One market observation is that organisations are now recognising from the outset that the implementation journey will not be a straight line and internal resources may often be stretched and/or lacking in experience of technology transformations.

To address this, organisations are increasingly looking externally to SMEs that can set up and run the ‘Project Management Office’ (‘PMO’) during the project lifecycle.

What Does The PMO Do?

Manage The Implementation: the PMO, led by a project or programme manager (dependent on scale and number of workstreams), is responsible for the coordination of the moving parts, both with the implementation vendor and internally within the organisation. This provides the project lead with the bandwidth needed to deliver on the strategic role of the project (and often technical SME); ensuring resources are secure, team morale is at a high, and that the objectives that the business needs to meet get realised.

Operational Readiness: the PMO can bring industry insights and experience to get your team ready ahead of the implementation. This involves getting the right team in place, preparing for the imminent data requests coming your way and making sure you have a route to access and pull the multiple sources of data needed and will work through cleansing this ahead of time. This readiness support delivers an extra pair(s) of hands which organisations typically need to help manage the activities that are timeconsuming, complex or require significant data support.

Testing Strategies For Execution: this is one of the areas of technology implementations that has the potential to create some of the greatest risks to the project, yet it is also an area where a lot is expected from the client implementation team who may have limited prior experience of software testing. There are very specific methodologies, approaches and tools that are used to conduct testing with a lot to prepare for. The PMO is skilled at breaking down this area of the project into meaningful and manageable activities whilst using best practice scenarios to support test script design to ensure an organisation is testing the full capabilities of the system before giving the green light to the vendor.

Provide Organisational Change Management: you only need to type this into a search engine to be inundated with the broad spectrum of thought leadership surrounding change management. Whilst there is much to be read on the matter the articles tend to have a widely accepted common theme; it’s something that is important to get right. All too often project leads treat this as a discrete activity scheduled into the latter period of the project when it should be incorporated throughout the project lifecycle. The PMO should incorporate change management into the plans, establish what the change curve will look like, and how the impacted parties will be managed which removes the danger of end users, business functions and customers rejecting adoption of the technology after all the configuration effort.

Key Takeaways

Technology implementations will always require a significant amount of investment from people contributing to the day-to-day project activities, right through to leadership investing their time to champion the business through the change. The timelines are usually a marathon not a sprint, and reserves of motivation are needed to get through the bumps along the way. Here are some key takeaways to keep in mind ahead of going into your implementation that will help set you up for success:

1. Strong pre-planning before starting with your vendor to align internally on business goals, budgets, and team selection. Don’t underestimate this phase.

2. Robust implementation methodologies that the whole team, both vendor and customer, understand and can get onboard with. Maintaining team morale will be critical.

3. SMEs need to be timely in what they execute and be advocates for the new technology. Some users that you rely upon may be in a comfort zone using the existing technology and miss opportunities to create more efficient processes in the new technology.

4. Put an emphasis on continual change management, don’t leave it until the last phase of the project. This will provide the business with confidence that the technology will land and be adopted by the business and wider users.

5. Draw in specialist consultancy skills for any gaps you might have e.g., if you don’t have a data conversion specialist look to the market, if project management does not exist in your team seek professional support. Whilst these are additional expenditures, taking the decision to get the job done by experts will reduce the risk of prolonging your implementation due to poor execution.

References:

(1) Mint Jutras: The Real Facts About ERP Implementation. https://ultraconsultants.com/ wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Real-FactsAbout-ERP-Implementation-final-rev-2.12.19.pdf

(2) Five Differences Between A Project Manager And A Project Leader https://www.forbes. com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/06/03/ five-differences-between-a-project-managerand-a-project-leader/?sh=a2e46246a14d

(3)Deloitte 2012-2013 survey “Insights for leading your large-scale technology implementation” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/ Deloitte/us/Documents/human-capital/ us-fanatical-about-smart-start-120514.pdf

(4) Deloitte 2012-2013 survey “Insights for leading your large-scale technology implementation” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/ Deloitte/us/Documents/human-capital/ us-fanatical-about-smart-start-120514.pdf

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