Handling Business Process Transformational Change during the lifecycle of an SRM upgrade – Part 2 (“Early stakeholder involvement and Supplier On-boarding” )
It is always a challenge to get convinced before getting to convince someone and make it a religion.
Daunting tasks of getting the factor called change “into the organization” is the biggest key we are talking here.
Have you ever had that feeling when you take a certain route to reach a destination and are extremely comfortable, even to the extent of knowing where every speadbreaker bumps you over and traffic cameras that flash your face, you ever want to take an alternate route.
Just relating that to a business scenario transformational change kicking in, seldom is it easy for the business team to get past veterans that execute a process in a way that they have been doing in the past.
Trust me even if you get to push the internal stake holders to adapt to the change, the external stake holders such as suppliers, never get the transformational adaptability easy, they feel it’s a bane for them to be even associated with you.
Some of the factors such as supplier awareness and an early involvement of the key external stakeholders in the transformational change can be a win-win for the buy and the sell side, I have witnessed it live that a Supplier On boarding kit, comes really handy if rolled out at least 3 months prior to go-live.
So project managers, when you are chalking out that very detailed implementation or upgrade plan, don’t forget to get this as a critical line item to success of the upgrade, even a screen that’s new and not well informed can get you uncomfortable signals than the kudos you’d generally expect from the sell-side.
What’s important to them is the volume of business and the repeatability, what’s important for you is TCO reduction.
Please ensure that you take these stake holders into confidence and let them know, what’s the impact, have a steering committee that specifically handles this change.
Trust me, don’t get bogged down, if things don’t go right the first time, teething issues are a given in such transformational programs, but nevertheless the success story goes a long way ahead.
Daunting tasks of getting the factor called change “into the organization” is the biggest key we are talking here.
Have you ever had that feeling when you take a certain route to reach a destination and are extremely comfortable, even to the extent of knowing where every speadbreaker bumps you over and traffic cameras that flash your face, you ever want to take an alternate route.
Just relating that to a business scenario transformational change kicking in, seldom is it easy for the business team to get past veterans that execute a process in a way that they have been doing in the past.
Trust me even if you get to push the internal stake holders to adapt to the change, the external stake holders such as suppliers, never get the transformational adaptability easy, they feel it’s a bane for them to be even associated with you.
Some of the factors such as supplier awareness and an early involvement of the key external stakeholders in the transformational change can be a win-win for the buy and the sell side, I have witnessed it live that a Supplier On boarding kit, comes really handy if rolled out at least 3 months prior to go-live.
So project managers, when you are chalking out that very detailed implementation or upgrade plan, don’t forget to get this as a critical line item to success of the upgrade, even a screen that’s new and not well informed can get you uncomfortable signals than the kudos you’d generally expect from the sell-side.
What’s important to them is the volume of business and the repeatability, what’s important for you is TCO reduction.
Please ensure that you take these stake holders into confidence and let them know, what’s the impact, have a steering committee that specifically handles this change.
Trust me, don’t get bogged down, if things don’t go right the first time, teething issues are a given in such transformational programs, but nevertheless the success story goes a long way ahead.
In Part 3 we will specifically address how the post go-live issues are handled by the already comfortable “Support team”, that at the time being is handling 2-3 tickets in a week and get paranoid when they see a sudden high tide in the number of support tickets that hit them immediately post go-live.
Let me know if you ever felt the jolt of such a situation.......
