Why system implementation support matters: getting more from your investment

When a system implementation goes wrong, it rarely fails outright on day one. More often, the return on investment is smaller than the business case promised. The project runs late or over budget or goes live with a reduced scope that needs a second phase to finish the job. In the worst cases, the system never makes it over the line and creates serious risks for the business.

Much of this can be traced back to the fine print. One of our clients recently received a proposal to implement Microsoft Business Central. The project plan ran for around nine months, but the proposal included just nine days of project management in total. That is roughly one day a month to steer a major system change.

In our experience, vendor project management is mostly about managing the vendor’s own team. It does not usually cover bringing your stakeholders and process owners to the table for design workshops, or making sure the right people are available to test the solution properly before go-live.

Other gaps are common too:

Data migration – Proposals often state that data migration is the client’s responsibility. The vendor may provide a day of training on the upload tools, then leave you to extract, cleanse, complete and load your data, and check it has landed correctly.

Training – Many packages use a train-the-trainer model. A few of your people are trained, and it is then up to them to train tens or hundreds of colleagues. Accountability for making sure everyone is ready stays with you.

Client-side coordination – Someone needs to manage your people through requirements, design, testing and go-live. That work rarely appears in a vendor’s scope.

Change management – helping your team through the psychological uncertainty of change, hand holding them every step of the way So that they adopt the new system faster and more completely in order to realise greater benefits and ROI it’s almost certainly not in your vendor’s scope

Working directly with a vendor is a bit like booking a self-catering, self-planned holiday. It can be a great success, and it can be cost-effective. But the organising falls on you. You research and book the flights, arrange transfers to and from the airport, sort out the accommodation, plan the trips and excursions, do the food shop and cook every meal. 

Working with a trusted partner alongside your vendor is more like booking a premium, all-inclusive package holiday. You pack your bags and the rest is looked after, from the pick-up at your front door to the arrangements waiting for you when you land. 

At Fluid, we look after the things the system vendor does not. We manage the vendor on your behalf and manage your own people through the change, so your team can keep running the business. 

The factors that most often separate a successful system implementation from a failed one are human, not technical. People need to understand why the change is happening, how their role and processes will change, and have the confidence to use the new system from day one. 

Prosci, the global leader in change management solutions, carries out long running benchmarking research which makes the point clearly. Of the projects with excellent change management, 88% met or exceeded their objectives, compared with only 13% of those with poor change management. That makes a project roughly seven times more likely to succeed. Even moving from poor to fair change management triples the likelihood of meeting objectives. The same research shows that excellent change management makes a project nearly five times more likely to stay on schedule and nearly 1.5 times more likely to stay on budget. 

At Fluid, our Head of Business Change, Sarah Toulson, leads our change approach using Prosci’s ADKAR model. It makes sure the people affected are Aware of the need for change, have the Desire to support it, gain the Knowledge and Ability to work in new ways, and receive the Reinforcement needed to make the change stick. You can read more about this in our blog on the benefits of change management. 

This approach was central to our work with ARC Inspirations on its move to Sage Intacct. Every team member was trained, informed and confident at go-live, with no negative feedback about preparedness. 

The most common barrier is cost. Done properly, professional project and change management can add around 40% on top of an implementation partner’s fees. When the focus is on buying and paying for technology, it is easy to see that wrapper of support as an optional extra that simply inflates the fees. 

Competitive tendering adds to the problem. Many vendors know their clients would benefit from change management and client-side support. But a vendor that includes it in their proposal can look expensive next to one that strips everything back to the basics. The tendering process rewards the leaner proposal, even when the vendor knows the client will need more. 

It is also worth noting that vendors often value this support too. On almost every project where we have worked alongside a vendor and a client, it is not just the client who tells us the project would not have gone as well without us. The vendor says it as well. 

The real question is what a suboptimal implementation would cost your business. What is the difference between achieving 50% of the benefits in your business case and getting close to 100%? What is the opportunity cost if it takes you a year longer than you planned for your team to adopt the new ways of working, and achieve the expected cost savings your new system will deliver? What is the cost, if the new system works so badly at go live that it permanently hits the confidence of the users that it can ever make their lives easier? A major system implementation is something most businesses only go through once a decade or so. The investment in getting it right is cost avoidance, risk reduction and benefit maximisation rolled into one. 

We focus on business outcomes, not technology deliverables. Our goal is not simply to get the new system live. It is to help you achieve the return on investment and the benefits set out in your original business case. 

That means implementing the software correctly, but it also means: 

• Engaging your people throughout, with a structured change management approach 

• Making sure users are not only fully trained, measuring that they are capable and giving extra support where they need it 

• Helping teams understand how their processes and ways of working will change and giving them adequate opportunities to become well practised in their new ways of working, prior to go live 

• Doing the heavy lifting on data migration, from extraction and cleansing to making sure data is ready for upload 

• Coordinating your people day to day, so the right stakeholders shape requirements, design and testing 

• Supporting adoption for weeks or months after go-live, so new ways of working are embedded and benefits are realised. 

Because we are solution agnostic, we have no hidden agenda to push a particular product or vendor. We sit on your side of the table and hold the implementation partner to account. 

If you are preparing for a new ERP, CRM or finance system and want to make sure it delivers the change you invested in, get in touch today to find out how our systems and processes team can help.