Identifying Challenges and Mitigating Risk During Deployment

Most people have come across the frequently used term “transformation” over last couple of years. This has been the backbone for many organizations to gain a tactical advantage, optimize their costs and margins, make their processes leaner to be more efficient, and add value and stay ahead in the ever-changing and fiercely competitive environment to which enterprises have been subjected.

Often, the biggest challenge starts with a basic question for management: whether to go for this transformation or not. After much contemplation, as a visionary in the driver’s seat, a chief executive officer (CEO) or chief information officer (CIO) makes the key decision of moving forward and seeks a budget from the board.

Deployment is only a part of overall transformation. There are initiatives across functions, for example, Oracle Transport Management, for logistics getting integrated with an SAP deployment. These changes involve a lot of manual tasks, and getting automated is the key to bringing value through transformation.

Is seeking budget approval the final challenge?

Often, it is understood that seeking top management buy-in is key for success. While this is true for moving ahead, a bigger challenge comes in setting up the road to deployment. Those steps include:

1. Setting up the right team to manage complexity and volume—Pulling the right people together for a project/transition is often difficult. Most people seek a structured approach to their career paths and may not be willing to take up a transition role. Examples encountered include when a business analyst wants to be groomed into a finance controller’s role instead of taking a detour to a project, or when a procurement lead aspires to become a supply chain manager rather than moving to a business process improvement role. It has been very clear that the experience of people in the field helps to understand relevant business requirements, hence, if a process involves taking onboard the resource, let him or her know the importance of that role to the project and what role he or she can take after the project. Doing this can help eliminate the apprehension of these resources with regard to potential impact on their career paths.
2. Keeping the team intact—Continuity and consistency are keys to achieving the desired outcome. Hence, the stability of the team once formed is vital to gain maximum value. Multiple variables play a key role in this stability such as the team’s location, family concerns, individual status, other opportunities, travel and time zones, to name a few, depending on size and scale of the project.
3. Selecting the deployment partner—It is common to have third-party specialized vendor support in the deployment of a large-scale project that requires a specific skill set. The challenge is not only in shortlisting the business partner, but also in finding the right fit. Commercial aspects of contracts are vital, but equally important are terms and conditions in the form of penalties, liquidated damages for nonperformance or missed deadlines, and defining service level agreements (SLAs), which could be very time consuming, but have a lasting impact on the project delivery.
   There have been instances of changing deployment partners midway through the early stages of a project, resulting in extra time, which can lead to cost overruns for the organization. This could jeopardize the execution time and budget for the project.
4. Defining the scope—Organizations with operations in various geographies often face the challenge of transition by phase. Enterprises with multiple verticals that are on different enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms pose additional challenges. The optimal way to find a solution is to find those verticals that have monumental value, rather than incremental value, if transformed. The choice may be very complex and difficult to make.
5. Engaging with the target audience—Once the minimum logistics mentioned previously are in place, it is important to engage with end users. Often, the challenge is getting their involvement while they are in their current jobs. Most of these engagements are generally perceived as additional tasks, so it can be challenging to get timely inputs for a smoother roll out.
6. Freezing requirements—Since all projects are timebound for delivery, the key is to crystalize requirements from the end user so that the requirements can be met when designing, developing, building and testing before it is put into production. It is not uncommon for end users to delay or show resistance to providing confirmations. Adding complexity to this are wish lists added to requirements.
7. Integration of various functions—Any big project ultimately has its impact on every function within an organization. The structure shown in figure 1 helps to capture some of the most common functions in sizable corporations. It is imperative that such initiatives have the support of all functions to develop synergy and achieve the desired result.

To look at an elementary example, any change in billing in finance requires involvement from sales in terms of client requirements (e.g., invoice format, mode of delivery, details on invoice and statutory requirements). Similarly, assuming there is a change by way of outsourcing accounts payable or for a rollout of a web-based submission of invoices, supply chain involvement right from the beginning when communicating with the vendor on how and where to submit invoices, whom to contact for outstanding payments, etc., are very important. Without these engagements, the process runs the danger of vendors not getting paid for a considerable time and putting business continuity at risk for a bumpy ride. Some considerations to make include:

• Risk in sampling user acceptance testing (UAT)—Though time is often a resource under constraints, it is very important that the UAT has a representative sample of real-life complicated scenarios, which are tailored to the nature of the business. Oversimplifying the UAT could expose roadblocks during the actual go-live wherein untested scenarios do not work as anticipated.
• Post-go live support—It is apparent that a strong post-go live support, popularly known as hypercare, must be well planned. The right kind of technical and conceptual team supporting hypercare can go a long way in soothing the strong headwinds that are most commonly expected after any big change.
• Key performance metrics—It is essential to ensure that the pace of activities for business is keeping up with the change. The development and monitoring of vital signs could prove to be very handy. The example in figure 2 shows some indicative examples of vital signs for a quick health check. Commonly, these metrics can be set up against a baseline to serve as a yardstick to measure level of damage, if any, or results as expected.
• Change adoption metrics—Since the objective of any transformation is bringing value as a byproduct of change, it makes sense to measure the change. Hence, like key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics to measure change can be developed (figure 3).

One important point to note for developing any metrics is to ensure that:

• Data required to measure these metrics are easily collectable in terms of cost and efforts.
• There is consistency in collection and representation so that it becomes comparable.
• Metrics that are quantitative in terms of percentages or actual numbers are used so they are easily understood and easy to compare against expected results.

Any metrics developed, however, should be representative of business objectives that are expected to be achieved over a particular period.

Automation vs. Manual Controls

Automation is expected to do away with manual tasks and bring about more integrity. Significant reliability and integrity can be enhanced by focusing on controls that were previously manual and embedding those as part of automation. The challenge, however, lies in integrating these with workflows across the organization and various subprocesses within the organization.

Figure 4 shows a risk control matrix. The sheer number of controls that might be in scope for an enterprise could pose a mammoth challenge in identifying which controls can be in scope and how they could be built, designed and tested.

A bigger test still is for this automation to withstand audit expectations.

Often, corporations have various subsystems that are being used in legacy, and replacing all of them at once may not be a practical possibility. Hence, the data feed from legacy systems to the prospective one in the form of multiple interfaces is one of the complex issues faced. Any gap in this interface could derail the project and pose a serious challenge for the enterprise. for example, in the case of a new payroll system vs. existing ERP, a failure in the data feed could jeopardize compensation payments to employees.

Conclusion

The complexity of any of the previously described challenges, which range from people, technology, time, external variables such as vendors or clients, and economic situations, could vary depending on the size of an enterprise and scale of the deployment. One action that will be indispensable to all deployments is commitment from everyone.