On November 15th I completed a contract that ended up being a year plus two and a half months in duration. It was enjoyable in many ways, I met a lot of very talented colleagues (we had a strong team of SAP consultants) and the process owners and the users at the client were both friendly and professional. The go-live was quite smooth by comparison to typical and the entire team (save the Business Warehouse report developer) has departed within 6 weeks of go-live with everything documented and handed over to the internal support team. Yet, by budget measures, this was not a successful project and it’s time to share some of my lessons learned (or rather re-learned in many cases). As we did not have a lessons learned meeting to close out this project (at least not with the consultants), I’ll put my own out there.
1) When is a “template” not a template? When it is not documented and many of the processes it may support have multiple methods within other business divisions and there has not been a determination of best-practice. On this project, we were doing a Canadian deployment of a “template” approach that had been developed for multiple vertical business units in the US. As is quite typical, Canada (as a horizontal business unit) comprised product lines from each of the US verticals and thus, could adopt business processes from all of the vertical business units in the US. And, although they shared a common SAP instance, each vertical business unit had developed their own fairly customized business processes and determining what was “in the template” was a matter of judgment.
2) Who is best suited to estimate the amount of work involved? The consultants who will do the work (if they are experienced) together with the project manager. We kind of did this at times during this project. And we kind of made efforts to level-load the consultants (adjusting roles and picking up some of the variable tasks with lesser-loaded consultants) but we could have teamed better on that front. It’s important to have honest conversations about how much work we really have (and not be too pushy with those who have lots or too quick to jump on those who have little). This is difficult in any work environment, but very important for projects as the longest work stream will ultimately be the project duration and there can be a lot of unnecessary cost if the project does not have mostly-balanced work streams. We had some of that on this project and I was the lightest work stream in this case. Fortunately, I was local and could be flexible with my schedule.
3) Change is hard to take, but some take it harder than others. I have often seen on ERP implementation projects, one business area that just isn’t keen on a new system. Although this is typical across the board (we all find comfort in what we have every day), when one department finds reason to delay, it can be quite costly as all areas need to wait. I ended up leaving this client 3 months after I was originally scheduled to leave. The scope of delivery in my area was expanded and the users and process owners were able to use the extra time to become that much more self-sufficient, but I don’t think that in my area (even with my diminished work schedule) the client really got good value for that investment in the extra time. I think that some extra leadership push on the change management front to bring in the go-live date by even one month would have saved substantial costs. As a team, I think we felt we were ready a month early and we didn’t really have a team discussion to make that determination. I do understand that erring on the side of caution can often make sense, but I was left wondering in this case about the cost of that caution.
I’ll leave it there. This was, overall, a good experience and a fairly smooth move to SAP for the client. I believe the process has begun for the client overall to recognize the SAP solution as a strong one – better in many ways (but not all) than the solution being replaced and the cost of maintenance will be lowered significantly. I enjoyed having work I could get to and from daily from my home and it was a great team to work with. I honed my knowledge in many areas of the SAP solution set (most notably, my areas of production planning and execution) and learned some new tricks (and applied for the first time a few I had known about).
As all projects should, this one leaves me more qualified for the next one and I look forward to taking that next one on.
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