Infosys-Oracle Blog : Change Management challenges in Projects solutions implementation.

Most of the organizations are typically used to tracking project progress based on % cost spent. Moving to a detailed, sophisticated and integrated Project management solution certainly poses a major “change management” challenge. In this blog lets look at few points which implementation team can keep in mind to address this effectively.

For the organizations, whose business is centered around project management, typically the most frequently used method to check on project progress is % cost spent. %cost spent as compared to cost budget that’s defined.

There are lot of pitfalls in measuring projects progress just based on % cost spent. In most of the cases of complex, engineering projects, typical capital expenditure projects, % cost spent will never give a real health check or a status about the project.

Organizations are realizing this and there are some options like Oracle projects solution.

Now when such organizations move to sophisticated PPM solution like “Oracle Projects”, it certainly creates lot of change management challenges. Ultimately the success of such initiative depends on how effectively these challenges are addressed.

Oracle Projects offers a tightly integrated solution with almost all the transactions systems which we have in EBiz suite of products. It has integration with General ledger, Accounts receivables, payables, Human resources, Inventory management, WIP, Asset management systems. This integration is a real strength in this integrated solution of Oracle projects and due to this integration you can have proper cost collection and checks on spend of projects funds as well. And this feature also poses a major challenge as far as change management in an organization is considered.

I think following three major points should be kept while designing the projects solution using Oracle PPM, for any organization. This will ensure that change management issues are handled effectively right from the design phase itself and not during the typical “training” phase.

Involvement of all stake holders

As mentioned above projects solution really impacts the current operational procedures for most of the departments of an organization.

It will have impact on procurement, payables, inventory, fixed assets, engineering and finance function of an organization.

So if solution is primarily driven by needs of project managers and project finance managers, and without checking on impact and feasibility on other related functions it creates a certain challenge in successful implementation of Projects solution.

Pause before you decide go for everything at one go

There is always a pressure on Internal IT to go big bang on projects solution and implement all the features which are available across Oracle PPM solution. Many a times, we may have a situation where requirements are driven by looking at the features rather than taking organizations change management strength and immediate priorities.

For Oracle’s PPM solution one can always look at two distinct features or solution. These two distinct features let you configure solutions where you can completely focus on “Projects financials” in phase one and then go for “Project and resource management” or vice e versa. There are lot of factors which will decide which way you want to go (ex. What is the existing foot print of Ebiz Suite of products? , what are the major pain points – are they related to managing only cost and budget? Or we are looking at some solution where team members can resolve issues collaboratively etc).

Stabilizing on one of these areas and then rolling out other features can be a option that should be considered.

However, its important to note that one has to be very careful about this judgment. For ex. If company is starting a new operation in say India or China and they are looking at implementing projects solutions, one can opt to go big bang for all projects features, look at best practices from out-of-box solution as this a new organization that’s starting and you can take a benefit of all features to establish your project management features.

Special focus on On-boarding processes in initial stages

After Go – live typically there is a period of two months, one month etc for supporting the issues that may come up. In this time frame organizations may invest on a consultant who has domain experience and has earlier worked on adopting these ERP driven processes as a end user him/herself.

He/She typically wont be a part of client Project management office, but a consultant who can work with al users and maybe contributes to some work that happens in the system.

This kind of assistance in the initial days, will certainly minimize the risk that may arise due to change management. In most of the cases client organizations have fully dedicated Business process champions during implementation phase, but a different version of this role (and probably different users) in initial few days of go live will help in change management process.