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With the right approach, your plan can translate the business case, operational requirements and project objectives into a successful ERP project. The plan then identifies the potential ROI, business requirements, project scope, effort and solution recommendations.
But a recent study by the Gartner group found that almost 65% of all IT projects failed to meet the goals of the sponsoring organization. These failures included project cost overruns, missed deadlines and a failure to achieve the ROI as planned.
A successful ERP project is one where the business goals are achieved, the project costs are within budget and the “go live” dates are met. It is created with a “top down” approach for the business issues and augmented with a thorough “bottoms up” operational review that involves the process owners within the organization. The result is a blueprint for both the ERP implementation and project success.
With well over 1,000 implementations to date, BroadPoint has developed and refined a methodology for ensuring that our clients are among the 35% that achieve project success. So what’s our definition of project success? A successful ERP project is one where the business goals are achieved, the project costs are within budget and the “go live” dates are met; and finally, where we have delighted the client with our service.
Successful ERP project planning starts with an executive visioning session. This is a “top down” driven process involving both the senior executive stakeholders within an organization and the ERP project team. Typically this would include the CEO, CFO, CIO and appropriate IT or operational staff that will be involved in the project. The goals are simple--to identify the business case and objectives for the ERP project. The planning is typically done in a morning session and is led by a facilitator.
The session focus is on the following critical factors:
A key tactic for a successful Executive Visioning session is to put technology last. A skilled facilitator has both deep business experience and technical knowledge of the software. By focusing on teasing out the business issues and not the technology, we can develop the broad business case for the project.
The next step after an Executive Visioning Session is to perform a detailed Operational Review and Business Analysis. In this step, all of the major operational requirements are discovered using a “bottom’s up” approach. BroadPoint’s process for this critical step is to facilitate a series of joint sessions with the appropriate operational staff or process owners and the organizations ERP project manager. It is critical in these sessions to first understand the business requirements and process for a given operational function. Later we’ll perform a gap analysis to compare the project requirements against the out of the box functionality of the considered software solution.
This expertise is used to guide the discussions with the process owners so that key requirements are discovered. The operational review can include:
The goal of this step is to identify all of the critical business requirements and to do so efficiently. This step may be anywhere from a day to a week depending on the complexity of the solution being considered and the maturity of the business processes being analyzed.
Once the Operational Review is completed, a Project Findings document is prepared. We’ve found that the results of the Executive Visioning Session create a strong foundation for the Operational Reviews. These in turn result in a Project Findings document that creates a blueprint for project success by aligning the ERP project recommendations with the business case, ROI project goals created in the Executive Visioning Session.
Once the ERP Project Findings document is completed, typically within ten days, it is presented and reviewed with the team that participated in the Executive Visioning Session. The discussion and Findings document include:
Hundreds of organizations have successfully navigated the implementation of a new ERP system using this approach. Effective planning plays a key role in ensuring a successful deployment of any new technology solution. By bringing together the business case, operational requirements and project objectives, an organization creates the foundation for an ERP project plan. Finally, by using a “top down” approach for the business issues and a “bottom’s up” review for the operational requirements, the result is a blueprint for both the ERP implementation and project success.
Posted by Lee Raesly on Fri - Jun 04, 2010 at 10:26 am EDT
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