Lessons Learned

• The benefits must be defined and made tangible as to which part of the organization bears the cost of the software and which receives the benefits.

  Everyone has heard all of the benefits about new systems. They are easier to use, do away with paper, increase productivity and sales, and reduce costs. However, there is a basic problem—a system cannot do this. A process can. The benefits for systems lie in the business processes in which they are embedded.

  Determining the benefits takes several steps. First, you have to define a new business process. In comparing the old and new processes, you obtain the benefits. But will the benefits be realized? You have to dig deeper. Now consider the new system. It is supposed to support the new business process. Will it? Better make sure. You should perform additional analysis to determine if the new system will support the new process. Finally, you want to follow up on the recommendations in Chapters 1, 2, and 10 in conducting reviews of the current and new processes to see if the benefits were achieved.

  Remember the approach to benefits. You consider negative benefits as well. That is, you answer the question “What will happen if the new software is not obtained? What will be the impact?” If there is a very old legacy system that is falling apart, then you may have no choice.

• Place as much weight on operations, marketing, and other areas as compared to accounting and finance.

  One of the problems that occur in implementing a large-scale system is that one user group or business area tends to step in and dominate the project. They steer the project to their own ends. This happened in one organization where accounting took control. The general ledger was installed fine, but marketing, sales, and operations got very little. An entire new project had to be started up to address their needs.

• Consider hiring a second consultant to watch over the main consultant involved in implementation support of the software package.

  You can easily become over-reliant on a large consulting firm. You may even assign project management responsibilities to them. This is not a very good idea. Once you do this you give up not only control, but also a window into what is really going on in the project. A better approach is to hire a second consulting firm on a very limited basis to monitor and assess the first consulting firm. This will promote healthy disagreements and likely uncover unpleasant situations much more earlier—better for you!

• Use the implementation as a means to gather more information on how business is done in different locations.

  Repeatedly, we have stressed how you want to piggyback on an international project. On this type of project you want to use the project to review and assess how the organization is performing their work.