3 Lessons Learned From: Financial Management System Implementations

When implementing, or planning to implement a new financial management system, there are a million (perhaps not literally) things that are going to be runinng through your mind at the time.

Even for seasoned veterans of financial change projects, who know the obstacles and challenges that will be faced, there's always a "what if" niggling away in the back of their mind. It's a huge risk to change your finance system, and you are going to approach this with some trepidation. It's as invevitable as the sun coming up (unless like me, and you live in Derbyshire).

From the software selling side of the fence, I'm faced with objections and questions all of the time; "how much resource do we need on this project", or "how long will it take before we're live". Everyone feels these pains, organisations both big and small.

Someone could write a book on 'lessons learned' from finance system implementations, someone probably has, or is, but I wanted to spend some time capturing the 3 most common ones that I've encountered. Hopefully these help with your own planning for a project, and help set some expectations for what to expect.

1 - How long will it be until we're live?

Without trying to sound condescending, my usual response to this question is "how long is a piece of string", becasuse this really depends on how you want to measure 'go live'. What does go live mean; when you're off the old system and using the new one, or when all the residual work post operational go live has been completed and staff are fully training and competent with the new systems?

Depending on requirements, a typical project takes anywhere from 4-6 months after signing a contract before the old systems can be turned off, and you can start using the new ones and we shift from the test environment to a live environment.

For many clients however this is only part of the story. As with anything in life there is a constant learning curve, with SaaS software there are going to be new functionality releases to help you get the most of the software, the introduction of new ways of working, plus the fact you've got a new software to wrap your head around to figure out how you're going to get the most out of it/extract maximum value.

Getting an understanding of this early on in your process will help you map out your path to success, rather then getting to go-live day and expecting everything to be smooth sailing. Set out your metrics for success and understand how you're going to measure against those throughout the project. Short of it is, the project doesn't just complete on go-live day.

2 - Do I need to put much resource into this project, is it going to take much time away from the day job?

It perhaps wouldn't come as much of a surprise that the clients who put the most time into their projects have the most successful outcomes. Some clients are able to put in 3:1 in terms of equivalent effort, so if we spend 2 hours covering a purchase requisitions workshop with key trainers, they're going away and spending an extra 4 hours delivering training on purchase requisitions to other users in their organisation (on top of the 2 spent in the session).

Now this might not work for everyone, and not every client has enough non-finance staff to warrant 6 hours of training on purchase requisitons and approvals, but it illustrates my point.

Perhaps the most applicable to everyone is charts of accounts and import templates. When you change your accounting system, it's a great opportunity to refresh your chart of accounts (a whole other article could be written on this), and the majority of our clients do. Some even do this before they've had their first kick off meeting, but it's definitely something worth spending 'extra time' or doing 'homework on', as are import templates that our consultants will ask you to complete during the project.

Just spending a bit of extra time, or homework as I like to call it, outside of the solution delivery sessions is going to be intrumental to project success. A 2:1 ratio of equivalent effort would be optimal to ensuring a very successful outcome to your project, and let's face it not every meeting is going to need 'homework' as a followup.

But when planning for the project it's important to keep in mind that you're going to need to invest some extra time on things outside of sessions with a consultant. We're there to hold your hand through the process at the end of the day and can guide you where necessary, and we're doing a lot of work on configuring the systems and delivering train the trainer sessions, a lot of this time you'll need to invest is around getting the most out of the software; further training/learning, testing, importing data, and so on.

3 - Something has broken during the implementation!

This is a good thing, and is a normal part of the implementation process. Part of the reason we deploy a test environment before moving to production/live, is to stress test the system during the implementation, we spend a good amount of time testing the system in a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase before the operational go live.

UAT is a final opportunity to stress test all of the training and configuration, make changes to the core system, and ensure that the system still operates. The UAT phase then gets signed off by both parties.

The implementation process is designed so that it tests and pushes things break, but in a good way, there will always be someone on hand to help remedy whatevers gone wrong.

Testing, breaking & fixing, is a crucial part of the process. Don't skip processes or cut corners with testing, and when things do go wrong it's all part of the process so don't be disheartened. This is perhaps one of the toughest lessons to embrace, as no one likes failure!

So there you have it. Most of the questions I hear center around those three 'lessons' which are big conversations and discussion points and could be talked about for ages.

I think a lot of the lessons clients learn from these projects are tough ones, perhaps that projects aren't as plain sailing as they imagined, and they need some extra time/resource throwing at them which starts with a good plan at the beginning.

Ultimately though it is time and effort well spent. Hopefully you've got to a point with your incumbent accounting solution where you need something better, and that is where Access comes in. A little bit of pain now, will see you crushing productivity and creating management packs on time, gaining more valuable insights into the business, controlling expenditure, and giving your team the freedom to do more.

Access has over 30 years experience of delivering financial management solutions to UK organisations who turnover between ￡5m-￡150m, we can help in every aspect of your journey and deliver and project manage all of our projects using our in house team of solution delivery experts.

If you're considering a review of your financial management systems, or want to understand the art of the possible (or even just chat about project implementation) then please reach out!