Envisioning a cloud-based solution to modernize your business operations requires gauging your project readiness. Your outdated processes and antiquated systems are likely causing frustration among employees and hindering company growth. So, as you embark on this transformative journey, ask yourself: Are you really ready to start this project?
Before scheduling that celebratory kick-off meeting, it’s essential to lay a solid foundation for success. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can inform your success metrics. Document your current baseline to determine if the new approaches you plan to deploy will save you time and money. Examine your data: can it be simplified and harmonized across your systems? Is your data clean and project ready? Addressing these data challenges at the start will save you headache later.
During this relatively quiet “pre-implementation” period, prioritize readiness across all facets of your project.
If you already have a culture of continuous improvement, many of these activities can be coordinated by your Centers of Excellence. If your organization hasn’t implemented an ERP system in many years (or if the last project didn’t go as smoothly as you had hoped), partnering with an Advisory Services Partner can guide you through this critical analysis, planning, and prioritization period.
In this blog, The Groove will guide you through preparing your organizations, defining roles to achieve success metrics, and creating a user-friendly experience. In Part 2 of this blog, we will dive into usability studies, business process optimization, and data analysis.
Assessing Organizational Project Readiness
No matter how promising the efficiencies and benefits of the deployment, success hinges on how project ready your organization is. Are your teams willing to embrace change? Human nature tends to resist change, often favoring familiar yet inefficient processes and sluggish system performance. For example, while some departments will be eager to ditch the poorly designed time tracking system, your purchasing department may think their procurement applications work fine. But does the technology meet the needs of asset managers, the maintenance team, requesters, and suppliers?
In the pursuit of assessing your organization's readiness, you must engage all your stakeholders, regardless of their level of involvement in the current processes. Establish distinct focus groups to understand how your employees use the current applications and the workarounds they’ve developed to get the job done. By probing into their pain points and desired application behaviors, you can tailor solutions that enhance workforce efficiency and job focus.
Focus groups are a great way to engage your key stakeholders, but they can be time consuming. Your process owners hopefully are already aware of the current system limitations and the common problems users face. To streamline the assessment process, you can also create an online survey and directly ask your employees questions about:
Whether you meet with representatives of select groups or survey all stakeholders, review the feedback, and analyze the common themes. This information will help you identify impediments early and determine who is looking forward to the transformation. Knowing who your early adopters and resisters are will inform your change management strategy, helping you understand which groups are project ready and which will need support in understanding the case for change.
Your goal for the deployment is to make your applications easier for your employees to use and for your management teams to make sound business decisions using timely, accurate data. However, your stakeholders will not be ready to accept the purpose of the project on Day One if you have not clearly stated your objectives and what is expected of each person who interacts with the new applications. You must define key performance indicators and processing targets that align with your overarching corporate objectives, and these metrics must be understood by your stakeholders. They need to understand how the new applications will help achieve the outlined objectives and what tools will be used for training and support.
Determining when to measure performance is also important. It’s best to measure multiple times: a month after go-live, at the end of the quarter, and at the first-year anniversary of when the project went live. Measuring often allows you to remediate if needed.
To recap, your success metrics planning activity should address the following:
What kind of experience are you planning for your workforce? Beyond simply replacing your current applications with leading-edge technology, consider how your user populations will access the new system. To start off, do they have laptops and email? Part of your project readiness activities is determining how your workforce is going to log into the system and how you will authenticate them.
Human-centered design puts employees first. Having a successful implementation is predicated on user adoption; therefore, it is imperative to configure a system that delivers user value, is simple to use, and enjoyable for employees.
Nothing is more frustrating for users than logging in and out of disparate systems to complete a task. Establishing a Single Sign-On (SSO) protocol eliminates the need to memorize multiple passwords and reduces security risks. Applications like Azure, Okta, or other applications using SAML (Security Access Markup Language) are an important consideration when implementing a cloud-based application like Workday and Eightfold.
To make certain your technology landscape is project ready, define an SSO strategy to maximize the user experience. Address the following steps to safeguard that first impression for your users:
Another challenge is that employees often perform activities outside of the current, disparate applications. For instance, when they are performing a transaction, like creating a job requisition or issuing a purchase order, countless emails, phone calls, and meetings have transpired before they ever log into a system. Wouldn’t it be nice to eliminate paper forms and initiate actions directly in the application to provide a seamless, fully integrated experience for your users?
When analyzing your project readiness, investigate whether employees initiate business events for themselves or if they rely on managers, HR, or purchasing to start the transactions. Host focus groups and/or create surveys to identify which processes and systems are working for them, and which ones get in the way of doing their jobs. Examine the end-to-end processes, including non-system activities, such as forms and websites as well.
The output of this discovery is to create Personas and Journey Maps to help visualize the future state from your stakeholders’ perspective. Personas are archetypes that express your employees’ needs, the applications and tools they use, their struggles, wants, and needs. Examples include Employee, Candidate, Contractor, Manager, Recruiter, HR Professional, Accountant, and Executive. Depending on their job functions, employees may see themselves in more than one persona. Journey Maps document what each persona does to facilitate each step in the business event, whether it’s interviewing candidates, onboarding new hires, creating purchase orders, or approving supplier invoices.
Once you have assessed your employees’ desires for a more seamless, consistent experience, you are ready to delve into how the work is being performed today before defining your future state processes. In our next Project Readiness blog, we will discuss usability studies, process optimization, and data analysis. The Groove looks forward to getting your organization project ready for a successful deployment.