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Multinational Software Deployment Lessons Learned
Lessons
Learned
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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