14 Lessons Learned

The programme took 4 years to deliver, had over 100 team members from The Warehouse Group, four main partner organisations and several smaller partners. I was the TWG Programme Manager.

Small disclaimer ..... all large scale transformational projects have their own challenges, and "one size does not fit all", my experience and learning's can broadly be applied to any transformational project. I have grouped learning into (1) People and (2) Process and System. I hope you find them useful.

PEOPLE LEARNING

Lesson #1: Test the Pre-sales team

They are typically very slick, and understand the product but often have not implemented a solution, and will have limited knowledge of your business and processes. Take every opportunity during pre-sales to have demonstrations on what is important to you, specifically showing:

(1) Essential business processes

(2) Important bespoke/edge cases to your company/industry; and

(3) Show localised solutions like bank accounts, currencies, time zones, post code v zip code, GST, IRD numbers (so often the solution targets American customers they forget the rest of the world).

Lesson #2: Select key internal resource/Hire of Labour before partner resources

Choose internal resourcing and/or hire of labour then focus on strategic partner resources, internal teams on the ground typically have closer alignment with end users and will challenge harder as they care more about the legacy they will leave (and dealing with disgruntled end users after go live).

Partner resource have numerous benefits, specifically getting support from the in-house product delivery team, but they will be the biggest part of your budget, with externals often commanding 2 or 3 times the cost of internal resources. So start lean and build up as required.

Also negotiate the flexibility to select partner resource for key roles (not all roles) like solution design/architecture/BA's and include in contracts the opportunity to interview for key roles.

Lesson #3: Limit your delivery partners

Do not engage more than two, by limiting the number of delivery partners it will reduce politics, conflict and confusion. When selecting ensure you choose partners that have owner’s mindset, those that can demonstrate the product and benefits, have experience in implementations, have pride in creating a solution that will stand the test of time, not those solely after billable hours.

This is also true for post go live support, use a partner who understands your solution and can get to root cause and fix quickly before S1s (the big problems) build up!

Lesson #4: Select team members with an owner's mindset

Attitude is everything but you should look for team members that tick a few of the boxes below:

(1) Results driven - they care that the solution developed is something they will be proud to handover to business users.

(2) Hands on team players who are prepared to help others that are struggling to keep the project moving.

(3) Has Levity - this will be a long journey, you need people who will work hard but have fun during the long and stressful times.

(4) Succinct communicators - those who can relay key messages efficiently.

(5) Future Focused - those that can see the future state and not just maintaining the old ways in a new system.

(6) Great Facilitators - to guide discussions, manage conflicts, and keep the team on track.

(7) Experience really does matter more in SaaS projects - those experienced with many implementations will predict pain points in advance and mitigate accordingly.

Lesson #5: Change Management (the People part) should be considered from the start, it is not just training

To use Proscii or other change tools means taking the end user through the sequential journey of ADKAR - Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Acceptance and Reinforcement over the whole journey, not just the end.

You are building a system to benefit end users, so always engage them – as much of a cliche as this is, too much focus on the technology can lead to a myopic solution, regular engagement to the solutions progress i.e. getting them hands on in the system, sharing major milestones, sharing key advances – this element is often overlooked. At the end they are your customers so involve them at every step.? If you have the luxury, start the project with Product / Technology training for SME's. If you leave it until the end when training is is needed, and/or consultants are leaving you will have some very ill informed end users.

Lesson #6: Create a supportive environment

There will be huge challenges, constant changes, key people leaving at the worst time, politics, so you need to provide the team cover from these pressures. Get to know your team, enjoy the wins, don't dwell on the losses, stay calm and focused.

PROCESS AND SYSTEM LEARNING

Lesson #7: Create a charter document

At the start, that clearly articulates – benefits, objectives, scope and solution. List the legacy applications and integrations, team structure, change management approach, program schedule/key milestones, ways of working (expectations of the team) – this last point is important to align different organisations and personalities within the project.

Lesson #8: Get functional requirements and architectural blueprint done at the start

Opportunities to design a new future-state do not happen often, get the pre-work done with key internal business functions before the consultants come in. It is pivotal to your budget that these requirements are clear before the meter starts running with consultants. The easiest part is creating excellent use cases covering 80% of key business needs, but you must pull out key edge cases, as these will often bite you later.

Use cases should be written by a great BA and knowledgeable business SMEs (describing the actor, goal and system) This is also the time to ensure that you have done MECE - Mutually Exclusive list and Collectively Exhaustive list of processes and they are prioritised using MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, won’t have) for your new system.

At the same time invest in Solution Architecture (Applications, Integrations and Data Architectures) that blueprints what the future ERP solution will look like, versus a fluid approach, will save in rework and cost.

Lesson #9 - Have the right level of Program Governance

This is critical particularly when things start to derail. Regular Monthly Steering Committee with Exec Sponsors will help when making the big decisions, regularity ensures there are no surprises, and the continuous sharing of information and quick course correction decisions.

Lesson #10: Data and Integration strategy

The most difficult part of the project!

Integrations are difficult: how the software works with your company's technology, both in house and external.? Prepare the exhaustive list of all integrations and what data needs to flow, work out what legacy systems require upgrades to work with the shiny new SaaS product and its new ERP features.

Data will be complex as information is often in many locations, often incomplete or inaccurate. It needs to be collected and cleansed, understand before the major lifting occurs, using integrations to move the data. Be sure that you know who will perform (1) extraction (2) transformation and (3) loading from legacy to new, with regular reviews of changes. To prepare, you should dedicate experienced resources for this process.

You should allocate ~60-70% of your budget to Data Migration/Integrations

Lesson #11: Make Meetings Efficient and Use the right tools for collaboration

There are so many great tools to enable sharing and collaboration, we used Microsoft teams for meetings and chat, Confluence for documentation, Jira for issue management and Miro for remote white-boarding and these tools were excellent.

Don't do meeting for meetings sake, only have them when needed, with clear objectives, the audience is "must have" people and they know why they are there. All too often meetings explode into a cast of thousands, inviting expensive resource “just in case.”? Those who are essential make mandatory, and optional attendees on standby, dialed in when needed.

Lesson #12: Track and meet deadlines

Understand the big deadlines (solution sign off, start build, data and integration readiness, Testing (SIT and UAT), Report delivery etc) that shouldn't be missed. A project management team needs to be well-trained, knowledgeable, and skilled in handling trade offs, offer up different solutions when needed and re-prioritise to deliver on time and in full to the big deadlines.

Lesson #13: Adopt (the new SaaS product) do not adapt it (to your old business processes)

You are spending millions on adopting a global best practice system, the business needs to understand that the old ways of doing things isn't necessarily the best, so engagement with these business users is important. With each additional change you make to SaaS products you will create additional work as there will be a need to isolate, and regression test for every quarterly update.? Keeping these changes to a minimum will be difficult, as often you will need to convince the business that existing processes they may have done for decades are not best practice.

Lesson #14: Adoption is a marathon

….And finally, well done in getting the product to market, this is a massive achievement, but the hard work with business users will start in hypercare, here you will find (no matter how much UAT is completed) niggles that need addressing when the system is used end to end.? You must budget for 6 months +, ideally having one of your key system integration partners stay with you to work out the fixes and/or continuous improvement deliverables. Adoption is a marathon, not a sprint, get resourced for this.

In conclusion, our ERP implementation wasn’t perfect, they never are but that is normal, after go live there have been challenges, but I am delighted to be part of the 30% club that successfully got this implementation across the line.

Please contact me if you want to know more, I hope you have found it useful. Thanks for reading and all the very best with your own projects.

#Transformation #ProjectManagement #ProgramManagement #ERP #SaaS #Oracle #Learnings #Projects #ChangeManagement #DataIntegration #TheWarehouse