A spoonful of jam with your systems implementation

The crisis was a Private Business’ system implementation. Six weeks past go live and errors and issues had arisen, which meant fundamentally customer service, key to many Private Businesses’ differentiation, was woeful.

This hadn’t been a particularly unusual implementation, a plan was in place. But I find when the topic of an implementation comes up with owners or the finance team it's always akin to open heart surgery, “we’ve got to do this to survive, it's going to be painful, we’ll have a long road to recovery”

Why is this? Selections are run, the best partners to implement chosen and project teams within the business set up.

On reflection I think a part of the answer is the jam to hold the implementation together, as;

 - An owner knows their business, but are often running their business with tight resources and having extra time for a project can be a challenge;

 - Experts know their systems well and how they work, but often have the time pressure of a fixed fee with the added pressure of having their best people on different projects

So what is the magic jam?

It's the expertise to sit between the two areas, someone who knows the questions to ask, has the support of the owner to hold both teams to account, but isn’t doing the implementation- they need to be able to see the wood for the trees.

Having seen the jam in action as a rapid action response to the above crisis, its effective.

But a better approach and I suspect more cost effective and less stressful one would be selecting the jam up front and not crossing your fingers for the time pressured open heart surgery.

But where to find this jam? - I know just the people....

Neil Philpott, Midlands Private Business Leader

Twitter: @Neil_Philpott

LinkedIn: Neil Philpott