Who's who?

Welcome to the fourth in a series of blog posts designed to help you understand the key steps to building a compelling business case for changing key systems or processes.

Today we are focusing on the final W in the series, the “Who”

There are two distinct selection processes when considering the “who”:

Selecting who will be your preferred partner :

This should be as much about their people, culture and capabilities as the products and services they offer.

They may have the best looking product but if their delivery and support capabilities are limited or poor and they cannot provide references of recent success (not just past glories) they need to be scored accordingly within your selection process.

Remember that this is going to be a long term relationship, so you need to get to know them on a deeper level than permitted by the limited time you have spent with their sales and pre-sales team.

Getting references and visiting some of their clients is important but so is visiting their offices to meet some of the team that will be involved in the implementation and longer term support to enable you to build a deeper relationship, better understand their culture and values and gain a level of trust beyond the gloss of the sales pitch.

Selecting Who will be on your project team.

Once you have selected your solution partner, you need to pick an internal team to work with that partner on the project.

Prince2 defines a project as: a temporary organisation created to deliver one or more business products according to an agreed business case.

Choosing and building that temporary organisation is critical to the success of any project and that team needs to have a mix of skills (technical, operational, people, organizational) and personalities (Optimists, Realists and even Pessimists) and include resources from across the business.

Remember that this is ultimately a business change project, not an IT project and the people making the decisions are not necessarily the people that will be using the solution on a daily basis.

Including a cross section from the business will provide engagement at multiple levels, enable people to challenge assumptions and ultimately provide a broader group of solution evangelists.

Nominating the correct resources to fill the key roles and ensuring those resources understand their role and responsibilities and crucially, have the authority to make timely decisions is vital to project success.

Management buy in and engagement is also critical as some challenges will ultimately need to be escalated so that decisions on the continued validity and continuance of the project can be made.

The structure of a project team needs to enable the members to manage up and down and across traditional boundaries. Not having that authority or autonomy will lead to delays or at worst a failed project.

In my experience, two common reasons for project failure are lack of senior management engagement and incorrect or insufficient resourcing.

Resourcing a project properly takes careful consideration, especially when the reality of business is that there is never a good time for changing complex systems or processes, so finding time for a project alongside business as usual tasks is very challenging, but must be done if you want the project to succeed.

Not freeing up that resource time will lead to prolonged project timelines, loss of momentum frustration and potentially a cancelled project.

Spending time understanding your “Who” will lead to a smoother delivery, better ownership and a higher likelihood of project success.

NMcG Consulting can help you to clarify your “Who” to aid in partner selection and building a successful project team.

Contact us via email at [contact@nmcg-consulting.com] or via the contact us form on our website http://www.nmcg-consulting.com