For those of you following my blog series based on some of my favorite movies, the title won’t come as a surprise. I hope that by combining my experiences with the best film plots, I will create both informative and entertaining content. To recap the timeline and circumstances, we went live in April 2018 with Microsoft Dynamics 365, having transitioned from an external legacy system and several other smaller software programs. The implementation restarted in January 2018, and we forced ourselves to go live within a compressed 14-week timeline. For the record–I don’t recommend this to anyone!
Now that you’re caught up on the basics, let’s jump into our campfire story. If you have never seen the 1968 production of Once Upon a Time in the West,I strongly encourage you to watch it. You will need to set aside three hours to do this, and I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie for those of you who haven’t seen it. First, it is essential to note that this film features multiple plot lines, each focused on distinct conflicts. It reminds me of an ERP implementation. The music is terrific, and while listening to one of the best soundtracks of all time, you are also trying to figure out what is happening. It is an epic tale of loyalty and mystery. At the end of the last scene, justice is served up cold, as it should be in any western film.
- Pay attention to the leadership being exhibited in this film -I won’t spoil it for you! Our implementation and subsequent go-live started just like this movie. With more than one dead body and a few troughs of despair, we had to learn how to climb out of. The leadership that our team needed to get through the endless trough is what matters in your implementation. Here are some tips we learned from our go-live.
- Confirm that the planned functionality can be achieved within your time frame.Verifying your configurations and ensuring the desired functionality is achievable within a shortened time frame.
- Don’t wait to validate. Data migration is a difficult task on its own. Make validating the data migration immediately after go-live a priority. Don’t get caught up in day-to-day operations and put this off.
- Ensure your configurations support your objectives. During implementation, key decisions and documentation of configurations must be captured at the level of consistency required of an ERP implementation. Just capturing that the decision was to turn on a setting won’t tell you why you made that choice, and if it aligned with what you were trying to achieve.
- Don’t cut corners with testing and training. Minimal testing and training were conducted before our go-live, which resulted in having to perform those tasks in a live-fire event. This caused sustained conflict trying to manage the correction of a process and teach people how to do something different from what they were initially taught. Don’t skimp on these items. They are too crucial to your business’s success.
- Plan for change.Be prepared to manage the change requests early. Although many get a handle on this process of request and control it usually doesnt happen until later in the project and the price of that could be having to redo things that were already deployed.
- You can’t just shoot from the hip. There will be competing priorities regardless of how your organization decides to implement the system. Each one may be just as important as another, but the trick is knowing how to determine priorities and their impact on the overall business. Establish some ground rules and a decision matrix to define how these decisions will be made.
- Communicating regularly and candidly should be done during your go-live.Someone once said, “Theories become tested in combat.” Going live in only 14 weeks forced us to select the things that we needed to deliver. I strongly encourage you to communicate with your users about the complexity of the implementation, particularly if you are working on a tight timeline. Supporting users post go-live and gaining their trust that the team would continue to remain committed to evolving the system to meet their business requirements was the focus in the months following go-live. As an employee-owned organization, it meant that everyone is a stakeholder and, consequently, has a say in how the business operates. Therefore, we took our responsibility to them very seriously when things weren’t going right and held ourselves accountable to do better. Even if your not an ESOP acting like one could be one way to achieve accountability during your implementation.
- Trusting your leadership to guide your implementation is only half of the job. The best quote from the movie is, “How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.” In this scene, an outsider is questioning why the group of outlaws follows such a man. From his perspective, they are following the wrong person. Communicating critical items, how to perform tasks, and being available to your users post-go-live is how you earn trust and quickly climb out of the trough of despair. Lead your implementation team by setting the example and don’t be afraid to ask tough questions.
I hope these tips are helpful to you. If you are going through an implementation or just survived one, please comment and give some feedback on any items you experienced. I look forward to connecting with you.
