And both approaches have their merits as was highlighted at software supplier Unit4’s customer conference in Birmingham last month. Construction consultancy, Cyril Sweett, went down the former route, while the University of Wolverhampton opted for the latter.

 

In part one of this two-part series, we explore the tack that Cyril Sweett took and what benefits and challenges it met along the way.

 

Back in 2008, the company began an internal exercise to identify where its pain points were. Emma O’Brien, the firm’s Agresso project manager, explains: “We needed to have one version of the truth, not ten. We were unable to tell how many people were employed by the company, for example. We’d get different answers every day.”

The aim was also to make service provision more efficient, which meant providing people with more appropriate tools to do their jobs. It also meant changing their behaviour.

 

“We needed a consistency of approach, but adaptable to change as we were growing rapidly internationally and through acquisition. We also wanted to focus on client intelligence so that we had a better understanding of who our clients are,” O’Brien explains.

After evaluating SAP, the Group decided to go with Unit4’s Aggresso applications. It was the largest ICT investment that Cyril Sweett had ever made as a business, which meant that the decision was not taken lightly and many tough questions were asked.

 

 

Such questions included: “How do we not fall into the pit of failed IT investments? Do we have the right skills? How do we manage scope creep? How can we ensure that our implementation costs do not get out of control?” recalls O’Brien.

The Group entered into a so-called ‘fast start’ agreement with its chosen vendor, which comprised an agreed fixed price deal to implement a standard, non-customised version of the system.

 

“We hadn’t got the people in-house so we wanted UNIT4 to come in and build it,” explains O’Brien. “It was a fixed price, ‘big bang’ approach. We didn’t want to be on a roadmap of implementing a system that would take us five years to achieve.”

She also believed that there was no point wasting time undertaking a huge business re-engineering exercise. “We said that we should explain what Aggresso would do, then they would tell us what was likely to be a problem. It’s a very different approach. We skipped over a lot, but we just took the best practice,” O’Brien says.

 

Taking this tack meant that the people involved in the workstreams were those affected by the change and so were able to provide valid input about their day-to-day jobs rather than getting bogged in why certain processes needed to be kept intact or not.

But in January last year, the firm also underwent a “gap alignment phase”, in which its project team worked with a number of Unit4 consultants to identify anything that might be a possible issue. The system itself was built from May onwards and tested between September to November, before going live in the UK and Ireland on 1 February.

But taking this kind of ‘big bang’ approach paid dividends, believes O’Brien. “We introduced all our change at once so it was just painful the once. There was not a long embedding-in process where you have to introduce a change, then get over that, then introduce some more change, then get over that and so on,” she says.

 

Doing it this way meant that the pain was felt by everyone in one go, not least because the system was designed to minimise the integration issues that could result from a phased approach, O’Brien adds.

 

Training activity was also introduced to support the roll-out and everyone was expected to take part, no matter what their role. But happily, it generated some unexpected spin-off benefits.

 

“We were implementing the competency areas and the hardest thing was getting information into the system so we made it mandatory as part of the training,” O’Brien says. “This meant we captured everyone’s competencies. On day one, people got immediate value back. People love being able to go in to see who’s got language skills and so on.”

 

The biggest challenge there, however, has been ensuring that the data is kept up-to-date and progress has, unfortunately, been “quite sketchy”, she adds.

The downside of going for a big bang approach, meanwhile, is that it introduces “a lot of change at once”, O’Brien concedes.

 

“Users focused on business critical activities first. On the first day, we went live everyone put their expenses in. That became a business critical issue. People learned how to put their holiday applications in pretty quickly and learned how to put invoices out quickly,” she says.
 
But the company failed to focus on “the softer aspects and HR felt that the most – things like competency management or training admin, the nice-to-haves”, O’Brien explains.

 

Moreover, the amount of change introduced meant that it was necessary to provide a lot of resource-heavy support when the system went live. “But that did bed down pretty quickly,” O’Brien says.

So after all of that, would she take the same path again? “I asked our group business systems director that and he said yes,” she concludes. “It was more cost-effective. Most of the unavoidable pain was dealt with as a single change and end-users will accept disruption for a defined period of time. Our biggest learning point: keep it simple as you can get carried away.”