The initial goals, conditions, and configuration of the project are discussed between the Sponsor from the client side and the Business Development Manager (BDM) from the vendor side. The Sponsor wants to hear how "everything will be great" with implementing the new system, and the BDM delivers exactly that. However, top managers (who usually sponsor the project) don't always share the full picture of upcoming changes with operational staff who will later work with the new system. On the other hand, the vendor's implementation specialists (Delivery team) are sometimes not fully aware of the promises made during the sales process, which leads to a lack of mutual understanding.
As a result, the project begins to "stall," and negative feedback only reaches C-Level when the situation has reached a critical point.
Each participant has their understanding of the project goals and their expectations:
A group of companies is involved in equipment manufacturing and maintenance. Financial planning and consolidation are done in Excel. Consolidated reports and budgets often contain manual collection and calculation errors. Increasing staff and redistributing tasks among employees, reducing the workload of existing personnel doesn't lead to tangible results. At some point, the CFO decides that automating planning and consolidation will solve all his problems. He begins monitoring the market, and very soon representatives from a well-known CPM system provider appear. Over a casual tea, they quickly came to an agreement: the CFO says the problem is exclusively human error, meaning responsible employees might incorrectly extend formulas to new periods or forget to add some new list item in Excel. They need to take the current Excel files and simply "put" them into the system. Otherwise, nothing needs to be changed because he is satisfied with the "format."
The vendor's BDM, without delving deeply into details, formulates the task in the contract accordingly. The project is executed on a T&M basis. The implementation team (delivery) looks at the contract provisions, which literally state that the current Excel files should be "literally" transferred to the system. And that's exactly what they begin to do. No one spends time on either design or user stories; everyone wants "quick success."
As a result, features not implemented in Excel don't appear in the system: versioning, Rolling Forward. Reference data is often not normalized. Input forms are inconvenient.
Employees try to work with the system and realize that obtaining target reports has become not simpler but multiple times more complex, because the old problems are compounded by the lack of user experience with the system and the inability to quickly fix something in formulas in a specific cell without breaking the entire model. Money has been spent, but reporting continues to be compiled in Excel.
The CFO calls in the BDM and informs him that the system is "bad" and doesn't facilitate the finance department's work at all. Although the platform itself is very good, mistakes were made at each stage of interaction between the project team groups.
Join us on April 17 for the webinar "How to avoid mistakes in automation projects" — we’ll cover common mistakes companies make at various stages of automation. The webinar starts at 10:30 AM (UAE time). Full agenda and registration — via the link.
