As we did research to market our CeleRITE platform, we found that minimizing business disruption was one of the top 5 obstacles to moving forward. After more than 20 years in the SAP ecosystem, I consistently learned that the number one best practice was always to draw people from the business and put them on the project team full time. Not only business people, but your best business people! Talk about disruptive! I can explain why this is best and have in earlier blogs. But I am seeing more and more companies say they can’t provide that much business time and end up in analysis paralysis, while they try to figure out how to move forward.
Hard core techies will talk about Near Zero Down Time, but that only addresses the disruption at go-live. What about the months of project work before then? Our CeleRITE platform can facilitate a faster project and carry over most of the old decisions currently established in your SAP ERP. But there is a lot more that can be done as part of the Applexus Low Touch Approach to migration.
There are 5 key dimensions to the approach:
- Governance
- Guiding Principles
- Fit-to-Standard or Fit-to-Baseline
- Project Organization
- Attitude
Governance - Governance is not micromanaging. A strong governance program will drive from the top and manage through clear objectives. This is done by providing vision and leadership for the program team. This includes defining and managing both project scope and ensuring the project team understands the business value expected from the project. Distractions and special interests will always push a project off course. Strong consistent leadership, once established, will ensure critical project issues and risks are self-managed and aligned stakeholders will be held accountable. This will allow the governance body to minimize their involvement while being supported by the right check points and processes.
Guiding Principles - Clear objectives are supported by strong guiding principles. Building Guiding Principles is about setting the priorities of what will be most important for this project to be successful. It helps the team get on the same page and “focus on what matters”. A strong OCM leader can help facilitate a session such as a Design Thinking workshop at the beginning of the project to establish these principles. The principles should be prioritized and help the project team make self-guided decisions based on clear thinking from the outset rather than the emotion of the present.
Fit-to-Standard - An often-used Guiding Principle is Fit-to-Standard. On new or “greenfield” implementations it simplifies enhancement discussions by providing these or similar questions before allowing a change from standard to be added to scope. Posing the following questions with at least one resounding “yes” is needed for the project to add the change to the scope.
- Is it strategic to the business?
- Does it provide a unique competitive advantage?
- Does it impact branding to the customer?
- Does it have a significant impact to process efficiency?
Similarly, in “brownfield” or hybrid migrations, a platform like CeleRITE will carryover as many previous decisions as possible to establish a baseline from which to drive the remaining project. A Fit-to-Baseline, similar to Fit-to-Standard, approach will be used to control scope and time. In this case, the team will not vary from the baseline decisions unless one of the same questions from above leads to a scope change. This dimension helps minimize business involvement through the solution design as decisions are mostly inherent to the direction established at the beginning of the project.
Project Organization - A strong project organization can also help minimize business involvement. Roles and responsibilities of business, IT and SI project members should be well defined with business process owners and IT having a clear understanding of which decisions require business involvement.
A key piece of the project organization is the Solution Design council. The Solution Design Council is a critical element to the Applexus Low Touch approach as it helps to enforce the guiding principles and accelerates decision making to keep the project on time, on scope and on budget. We have implemented a “spider approach” which helps minimize business time by leveraging a hub and spoke model that efficiently gains consensus and creates awareness of big decisions as they occur.
Attitude - The fifth dimension is Attitude. In many ways it is the most important aspect of the project. If you need to limit the time spent from Business resources, they will require a positive attitude, flexibility, and acceptance. The guideposts help with this, however it is not unusual for business members to feel that the solution is being imposed on them. They will need to maintain a positive attitude and remember to be flexible on what exactly they will get from the solution. Final acceptance will need to align the original objectives with the solution delivered. If the solution meets the objectives, then they need to acknowledge that fact and figure out the best way to establish a continuous improvement program. OCM is another key aspect to developing a positive attitude. Communications to end users, the project team, and any third parties needs to be tailored to each audience and Training needs to have an approach that can address the unique requirements of different generations with micro learning and eLearnings to help minimize the classroom training.
If you are looking at migrating to S/4HANA and you run a lean organization that will have trouble providing the level of business resources, please reach out to me so we can discuss in more detail how we can help you achieve success.
