How to Phase ERP Software Implementations

planning and phasing an implementation in a way that makes sense for your organization can be a tricky art but there's also a science to it what is the science and how do we create the Arts of implementation phasing that's what I want to talk about here [Music] today my name is Eric Kimberling I'm the CEO of third stage Consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world reach their third stage of digital transformation success and when we're helping clients Define their implementation road map and their plan for their Erp implementation or any sort of digital transformation we find that it can be tricky to phase the project in a way that makes sense for the organization you have the option of either going big bang and implementing everything all at once or what's more feasible for most organizations is implementing phases but the tricky part part of this is figuring out which phases make the most sense and how exactly we phase the project how incremental you want the implementation plan to be and overall how you're going to phase the project so what I want to do today is talk about the different variables to consider to help you define a phasing strategy for your implementation that makes the most sense for your organization to learn more about digital strategies and ways to plan for your digital transformation I encourage you to read my new book called The Final Countdown you can buy that book on Amazon I've included a QR code here in front of you or you can go to the links below you can also just go to the final countdown. to learn more about that book first it helps to understand and discuss what exactly implementation phasing is essentially when you're deploying new technology or Technologies you have two different schools of thought on how you deploy that technology one would be that you deploy everything all at once and you flip the switch and on day one you're using new technologies across the Enterprise across all the different technology platforms that you've just implemented the other school of thought would be that you take a more incremental approach and phase the project or phase the Technologies to where you're not flipping the switch all in day one but instead you might have certain parts of your business or certain modules of the technology that go live at different times in more of a sequential phased approach and a lot of organizations might do somewhat of a hybrid somewhere in between what we're finding though over time is that most organizations are too risk adverse and they don't see a lot of value in doing the big bang massive transition all at once so most organizations inevitably end up with a sort of phasing strategy where they say we're going to incrementally roll out this technology to different parts of our organization or using different modules or different Technologies throughout the overall transformation but then the question becomes well how do we phase it what's the right way for us to phase the project how many phases should we have how do we phase it do we phase it based on processes based on modules based on Technologies does data consider or factor into it these are all things we have to answer questions to and that's what I want to talk about here today is now that we understand what implementation phasing is and why it's so important as a risk mitigation measure now we need to figure out well what is it we need to do to determine what the right phasing strategy is for our [Music] organization one of the first ways that you can consider phasing your technology is by looking at business processes and choosing the business processes that are going to add the most value to your organization and focusing on those business processes first in your phasing strategy so if for example Le Topline Revenue growth is one of the biggest opportunities for improvement within your organization it may be that your digital transformation focuses on automating your sales processes first to help drive that Topline Revenue growth you may set aside other Technologies like financials or Inventory management other things that are still going to add value to your overall transformation and your overall business but maybe not as much value as you expect to get from in this example your sales automation so that would be one example you can look at is look at your business processes and ident identify those areas that are the lowest hanging fruit the most immediate value potential in terms of implementing new technologies and focus on that phasing strategy first now of course we've got to reconcile what we think our priorities are in terms of business processes we've got to reconcile that with the realities of the Technologies and some of the other considerations we're going to get to here in this video but that's one dimension to look at one variable to consider first is what business processes Which business processes are going to deliver the most value most immediately and let's phase our project accordingly based on [Music] that another variable or Dimension to view your phasing strategy from is the software itself and how the software is broken into different modules so depending on what software solution or Solutions you're deploying you're going to have different ways that the software is architected and different ways of piecing together different modules of that particular technology so that's one consideration you have to look at is just what is the technology you're deploying and how would you potentially phase the strategy based on that technology another way to think about this is we have to deploy technology in a way that makes sense in the way the technology fits together for that particular vendor that specific solution so for example it might not be realistic to deploy your financial reporting without also deploying your inventory management as an example because it's hard to do your financials if you don't have Automation and good tracking of your inventory management so that'd be a good example of how you may not want to split apart those two modules or those two functions into different phases you might want to actually combine those into one phase however going back to my example earlier about sales automation typically for a lot of software Solutions you can set aside sales automation without necessarily having to have inventory management or your financials put in place so if you're implementing a new Erp system for example it may be that you deploy these Technologies based on how the modules fit together now no matter how you phase the Technologies there's going to be some sort of trade-off and interim solution or a Band-Aid that you're going to need to tie together some of these different systems so if you for example just put in a new sales automation module it might be that you have to create an interim integration from that sales automation to your financial so you can track revenue for example and that interim integration will go away eventually if you deploy other modules of that same solution to eventually automate your financials but in the meantime you've got to create this interim automation or this interim integration so that's the sort of consideration you have to look at is yes now we've broken up our implementation phasing into smaller incremental pieces but now we've created rework that has to be done to ensure that you have integration in the meantime while you're still rolling out the other types of Technologies so these are all trade-offs pros and cons and risk that we have to manage and work through but the technology limitations and the way the technology is architected is one consideration and one input into the overall phasing [Music] strategy another thing we need to look at is the organization itself so when we look inward at us as an organization and where the most pain is organizationally or where the most opportunity for improvement is within the organization we might find that that influences or affects the way we phase the implementation of new technologies for example if we find that the finance department is really Under Pressure it's highly inefficient a lot of manual processes the data is siloed people within the finance organization have trouble accessing data closing the books every month that sort of thing it may be that that organizational pressure forces you to prioritize financials in this example so you also want to look inward at who you are as an organization your culture where your pain points are what parts of your organization you think might be most willing to accept new technologies might be the most excited about new technologies and use that as a way to prioritize and phase the project it's a lot easier to have an early stage or an early phase of a project that's focused on parts of the the organization that are excited and in the most need for new technologies because that'll help you build momentum and then when you get to other parts of the organization that might not be as excited or might even be adverse to new technologies you've already built up some momentto and some quick winds along the way so the organizational considerations are something you need to look at as well as another input into determining what the right phasing strategy is for your [Music] organization another consideration to look at as you define your phasing strategy for your implementation is risk management so we as organizations and we as Leaders within organizations have to look at how comfortable are we with risk and how much risk are we willing to take and also we have to look at how are we going to mitigate whatever risk we do or don't accept so this influences our phasing strategy because if we're more risk adverse for example it may be that that's going to cause us to want to be more incremental it may be a little slower in our rollout it might mean that we break our project into more phases it might mean that each phase is going to be a little bit longer longer than a more risk tolerant organization so we have to look at the realities of who we are not necessarily who we want to be in the future but who are we right now and what's going to be realistic for us as an organization and then we manage the risk accordingly we've worked with some clients that are extremely comfortable with risk they're high growth fast-moving organizations they take on a lot of risk day-to-day and they might be more inclined to take more of a big bang or something that's less phasing and more aggressive in the rollout schedule however most organizations we work with especially larger more mature organizations are just more risk adverse For Better or For Worse that's not a judgment it's not meant to be a criticism of those organizations that's the reality of most big organizations is they're risk adverse and therefore they need to come up with the implementation phasing strategy that reflects who they are and it has to be something that fits them that they can be comfortable with but no matter what you do if you phase the project there are risks associated with more incremental approaches the changes can take longer the implementation itself can take longer you have a lot of interim rework that needs to happen as you integrate Legacy systems that are slowly being phased out so there is risk associated with it one of the biggest risks too is that change fatigue becomes an issue as the project takes longer if you break it up into too many phases you end up in a situation where the organization itself starts to doubt the project and starts to get tired so you have to look at all these risks on both sides of the equation and really assess your phasing strategies and your phasing options from the perspective of what's going to help us mitigate the risk the best and what's going to fit our risk t the best as an [Music] organization finally another consideration is managing the scope of the project itself it might be that it's more appropriate for us to scale back the scope and roll out less Technologies in the name of being more risk tolerant and managing risk more effectively or making sure that we get the most value as we possibly can out of the Technologies we do deploy rather than trying to boil the ocean too often an organization try to bite off more than they can choose they deploy too much technology that never gets used and never adds value to the organization so there's something to be said for organizations that say we're actually going to cut back scope and we're going to try and do it really well and knock it out of the park with what we do deploy so reducing scope managing scope that's another consideration you need to look at because that ultimately influences how you're going to phase the project and one of the potential benefits of reducing scope is that you're also reducing risk now you might also be reducing business value longer term but in the short term you might be reducing risk and reducing cost and for a lot of organizations that's more important so again you really have to look at who you are as an organization and what's most important to reflect your priorities and your overall strategic objectives so once we've looked at our implementation phasing options and our Alternatives the pros and cons of each we've looked at it through these different lenses that we've talked about now we've got to reconcile because a lot of times you find that when you look at phasing through the different lenses that I've talked about in this video there's some conflicts there's some things that don't match up in other words it may be that what our business process priorities are don't necessarily align with how the software can realistically be deployed in which case we've got to figure out how are we going to reconcile that and how are we going to sort of create a tiebreaker to figure out what the right answer is so we take these qualitative inputs based on these different dimensions and variables that we evaluate the implementation phasing options from and then we ultimately come up with a phasing strategy that makes the most sense for us as an organization now the key here is to really look at the risks and the benefits of every option we consider and we have to recognize that there's not going to be a silver bullet there's not a perfect answer here there's going to be tradeoffs there's going to be risks that remain no matter what strategy we develop so we just have to understand what they are and have a risk mitigation strategy to address those risks as we Define the phasing strategy so these are some of the ways that you can look at and evaluate your implementation phasing options hopefully it's given you some ideas on how to start to think about your phasing strategy and certainly if you'd like to learn more and discuss some ideas on how to phase your project I'd be happy to brainstorm ideas with you I've included my contact information below if you'd like to reach out for informal conversation to discuss how you might phase your upcoming project I also encourage you to read my new book called The Final Countdown which discusses digital strategy and more detail gives you some additional insights and depth into how you might phase your implementation strategy and Define a phasing strategy that makes the most sense for your organization you can learn more about that book or buy it by scanning the QR code in front of you or you can go to the links below or simply go to the final countdown. to learn more about that book so hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day

Channel: Digital Transformation with Eric Kimberling

Views: 1,763

Keywords: ERP Implementation, Digital Transformation, Phasing Strategy, Implementation Phasing, Technology Deployment, Business Processes, Software Modules, Organizational Structure, Risk Management, Change Fatigue, Scope Management

Id: lRYq_Hc7FYY

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024