Key Success Factors for System Implementations
There are few efforts that will challenge your people, processes, and tools more than a technology system implementation. There is a lot at stake in a system implementation - if successful these efforts are transformative; delays or rollbacks can leave organization doing damage control for under delivering, teams will revert to antiquated tools and processes, and anyone who has put their all behind these efforts will find themselves demoralized. Ultimately the needs of the company are no longer being met, which can in-turn increase the stress on already, at times, tense partnership between Business Operations and IT.
From our experience leading successful system implementations, here are our top recommendations by phase to set your team and project up for success:
Discover/Plan
Validate the right voices are in the room. During stakeholder analysis, determine which areas current stakeholders can represent and where additional perspectives are needed; this mitigates blind spots throughout the implementation.
Define scope and change control process up front. Set scope expectations and outline how changes will be evaluated and conducted through the entire implementation and transition to operations.
Define current and future state business process. Do not leave home without it! Defining current processes and how those will change is especially important as you layer in process improvement with the implementation. How things work today will change with the new system and participants should be prepared.
Operational needs always take priority. Operations resources are critical to the success of any implementation and day-to-day operations must continue. Ensure the plan incorporates the resources needed to make the project successful and build time into the schedule to work around key operational activities.
Design/Build/Test
Do not leave your requirements in the rearview. Business requirements are identified early - and then people get busy, and timelines may get tight. Meeting requirements for the business must always be the road in front of you, with consistent monitoring to ensure the project stays enroute, avoiding scope creep or dissatisfied stakeholders.
Discourage a “lift and shift” mentality. It can be second nature to default to what we know instead of looking for opportunities to gain efficiencies. If your teams have been doing something for years the exact same way, making changes in how they do their work can be challenging. New systems bring new approaches based on industry advancements and standards that are beneficial across an organization. Encourage your teams to be open to new approaches through change management best practice and focus on the benefits to the individual employees and the company.
Understand process and mindset shifts in multi-tenant cloud environments versus on-prem. Moving business applications to a multi-tenant cloud-based architecture brings a variety of benefits such as reduced total cost of ownership, scalability, and a software as a service (SaaS) model. This also means that software updates are on a cadence determined by the software provider and the company needs to be aligned with that cadence with the resources needed to manage, test, and validate changes as they come into the production environment.
Deploy/Transition to Operations
The cutover plan should be regularly tested and validated. Mitigating risk at go live requires regular testing. This takes time, iteration, and repetition with a large group of technical and business stakeholders. Testing and validating your cutover plan allow for a smoother transition at go live through increased participate readiness and better awareness of where issues might arise.
Transition to Operations will make or break the implementation. Implementations can be multi-year efforts with dedicated project resources that cover work that the operational teams will need to lead long-term. Engaging the system analyst team to build operational plans, error handling, downtime procedures, policies, and ownership of artifacts increases knowledge transfer and adoption.
Close
You did it! Celebrate the go live and the success of the team. Regardless of issues that arise at go live (there are always some) ensure the team is recognized for all their hard work, effort, and commitment to advancing the company objectives.
Take time and reflect on the effort. This ensures learnings across IT and business partners are carried forward. Conduct a formal lessons-learned workshop with key stakeholders and the project team to outline successes and areas for improvement in the next implementation.
Documentation wrap-up. Transitioning sometimes multiple years of work to operations should not be underestimated. Processes, procedures, and methods need to be thoroughly documented to support ongoing operations.
Set yourself up for success for optimization efforts ahead. There will likely be a list of optimization efforts that teams are eager to move forward on.First, acknowledging your successful management of scope throughout the implementation, this optimization list is a result of your concerted efforts. Second, engage business partners in prioritization efforts of the optimization items to increase long-term buy-in.
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