Graham Oliver, director – local government and accounting at Moore Insight, chaired a panel at the LATIF & FDs’ Summit last month, titled ‘An FDs’ guide to successful technology implementation’. Here, he details some of the key points raised.
- Don’t forget the basics of good project management: It’s often the case that if there’s a clash between a business-as-usual (BAU) task and a project task, the BAU will win. What’s needed is strong governance; whilst this does not guarantee success, poor project management will almost certainly guarantee some sort of failure, slippage or additional cost.
- Specify your requirements: If you don’t know what your requirements are then how can a potential supplier appropriately respond? When you go to market make sure you know exactly what you want. However, be careful not to over-specify. Highlight the critical attributes that you need and state the broad parameters of what you want. Allow the market to tell you how best to achieve these.
- Split of roles between supplier and customer: From our experience with ERP implementations, a supplier will provide ~30% of the effort required, meaning that ~70% is your responsibility. Be clear on roles and responsibilities with your implementor from the outset.
- Understand when external help is needed: Work out the roles on the project that are critical to be fulfilled by internal staff, and those that you need external help with. For example:
- Task requires knowledge retention within the organisation: internally resource tasks such as user acceptance testing and/or training.
- Task is a one-off and knowledge retention is not required: bring in external help for tasks like integrations, which are often complex.
- Tackle data migration early on: Data migration is often incorrectly thought of as a ‘cutover/go-live’ task. This is not the case. At the start of the project, a data strategy needs to be approved, data cleansing should be happening throughout the project. In data migration, the export, transform, and load (ETL) process is complex. Most software suppliers only provide the tools and training to do the data load, and the customer has the responsibility for the E and T elements so hashing this out at the start of your project is crucial.
And what did my fellow panel members say?
Ian Owen, industry director, public sector at TechnologyOne, challenged the audience to not stick to the status quo. This is often seen as the easiest and cheapest option, and meets least resistance in organisations. But, if you have had a finance system in place for the past 15 years, should you be carrying on the same way? Challenging yourself will almost certainly require you to ‘rip up’ your established ways of doing things, but by doing this you will drive efficiencies.
Omid Shiraji, consultant CIO and advisor Local Government, suggested organisations stop referring to implementations as IT projects; label them as transformational in some way. By doing this it changes the mindset in relation to the project and buy-in across the organisation, and the project is seen as more of an investment.
Finally, Rikin Tailor, director of finance at Westminster City Council, had two words to sum up his viewpoint – people and culture. Whilst we are implementing technology solutions, we must remember our business is about people, whether the staff using the systems or the local taxpayers using the services.
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