How to involve
IT during an EPM project
Is an EPM project a finance project or an IT project? In my experience I have found situations where:
1. Finance wanted to own the project
2. IT wanted to own the project
3. Both want to own the project
4. Neither want to own the project
It really depends on the size of the organisation, history and capability of all parties.
In general though, the business case is driven and sponsored by finance as they'll be the guys who are gaining the benefit from the implementation. However, in the same way that accounting training does not give us the skills to be good managers, it also does not give us the right tools to implement an EPM project and so we are going to need to engage with IT significantly during the project.
This engagement is going to be tricky. For a start, the language is completely different. We are talking beans and the Techies are talking SQL. These two groups of people are not generally drinking buddies. The only common interest is that they are disliked by pretty much every other group in the organisation :)
During the project, IT could help with:
1. Procuring licences.
2. Project Management
3. Pricing Application Environments
4. Data Transformation
5. Extract, Transform and Loading
6. System security
7. Automation on tasks
8. Backups and restores
9. System maintenance
10. Performance tuning
11. System testing
12. Patch upgrades
So it is inevitable that the finance guys are going to need a significant amount if help from IT. It's obviously important to engage early, during the business case for sure. Many decisions that are going to be made early are going to need IT input and like other human beings, it they're involved from the start then they are going to take ownership earlier.
Get a good IT project manager on board, not one that just shuffles paper and polishes his framed PRINCE2 certificate. This guy is your interpreter, your translator from beans to bytes. As a finance guy you don't want to talk to Colin the SQL programmer. There'll be far too many uncomfortable pauses as you realise you have absolutely nothing in common. Use your PM!
Your PM is also there to make sure you are adhering to the correct project management processes. Sometimes you will feel he's being a jobs worth but suck it up and run with it. He'll only blame you when it all screws up and it was because you went straight to build without signing off design...
You'll probably have a consulting partner helping you out on the project. They'll be really slick, have been through countless implementations and you'll look to them for a lot of support and leadership. It's true to say that in this relationship, their knowledge makes then the dominant party and it’s sometimes very easy for them to lead you more than you may realise. Not everybody is as honest and trustworthy as me!
Use your PM to sniff out the BS and be your sounding board. He'll be less passionate about the detail than you which is a good thing as he'll not get caries away.
In summary, the answer is to get a good PM on board early. The difficulty is now finding one...............
Is an EPM project a finance project or an IT project? In my experience I have found situations where:
1. Finance wanted to own the project
2. IT wanted to own the project
3. Both want to own the project
4. Neither want to own the project
It really depends on the size of the organisation, history and capability of all parties.
In general though, the business case is driven and sponsored by finance as they'll be the guys who are gaining the benefit from the implementation. However, in the same way that accounting training does not give us the skills to be good managers, it also does not give us the right tools to implement an EPM project and so we are going to need to engage with IT significantly during the project.
This engagement is going to be tricky. For a start, the language is completely different. We are talking beans and the Techies are talking SQL. These two groups of people are not generally drinking buddies. The only common interest is that they are disliked by pretty much every other group in the organisation :)
During the project, IT could help with:
1. Procuring licences.
2. Project Management
3. Pricing Application Environments
4. Data Transformation
5. Extract, Transform and Loading
6. System security
7. Automation on tasks
8. Backups and restores
9. System maintenance
10. Performance tuning
11. System testing
12. Patch upgrades
So it is inevitable that the finance guys are going to need a significant amount if help from IT. It's obviously important to engage early, during the business case for sure. Many decisions that are going to be made early are going to need IT input and like other human beings, it they're involved from the start then they are going to take ownership earlier.
Get a good IT project manager on board, not one that just shuffles paper and polishes his framed PRINCE2 certificate. This guy is your interpreter, your translator from beans to bytes. As a finance guy you don't want to talk to Colin the SQL programmer. There'll be far too many uncomfortable pauses as you realise you have absolutely nothing in common. Use your PM!
Your PM is also there to make sure you are adhering to the correct project management processes. Sometimes you will feel he's being a jobs worth but suck it up and run with it. He'll only blame you when it all screws up and it was because you went straight to build without signing off design...
You'll probably have a consulting partner helping you out on the project. They'll be really slick, have been through countless implementations and you'll look to them for a lot of support and leadership. It's true to say that in this relationship, their knowledge makes then the dominant party and it’s sometimes very easy for them to lead you more than you may realise. Not everybody is as honest and trustworthy as me!
Use your PM to sniff out the BS and be your sounding board. He'll be less passionate about the detail than you which is a good thing as he'll not get caries away.
In summary, the answer is to get a good PM on board early. The difficulty is now finding one...............
I think your post hits the core of the problem. I have always thought that EPM project ownership is easily impacting the overall effectiveness of the implementation.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, it is fundamental to involve Finance guys, since they are the final beneficiaries of the project and therefore it is them who supposedly know what they want to get from it.
On the other side IT is necessarily involved, especially in the procurement of all the underlying technological means that consititute the boundary conditions of the tool environment (HW, SW, licenses etc.)
I don't disagree therefore that the key to success might be having a good PM leading the project and managing all needed rosources. However I also believe that an important factor is the organisational one, it is a must to involve the top management, to make so that all departments work in synergy and have all the required "motivation" to fullfill their duties. Otherwise the whole thing could degenerate at a level where one department is rowing agains the other compromising possibly the outcome of the project.
Finally I believe that another real plus is having a Lead consultant profile who can act as a natural translator between IT and Finance slang to avoid any possible misunderstanding and more importantly to have poth parties feeling at ease in supporting a common cause.
Thanks for your comments Fabio, all great points. The hardest part is indeed to get all parties working together and in the same direction. It's all too easy for IT and finance to start blaming each other when things don't go well, which is why I think it's key to engage early and set the boundaries. Cheers.
ReplyDelete