Usually, executive sponsors, product owners, and business unit SMEs want to be involved in their ERP projects. It’s common, however, in small and midsize organizations that project involvement is limited due to workloads and limited staffing. Poor participation in projects may also be due to (a) politics, (b) resistance to change, or (c) staff avoiding the project to reduce their professional risk. These project avoidance scenarios undermine a project putting it at risk by making it difficult for the implementation team to prepare requirements and design specifications for a new system. The project manager must identify these risk situations and try to implement mitigations.
Mitigating Limited Staff or Limited Staff Availability
There are a couple of options to help mitigate limited client staff involvement in a project due to work obligations or if there are too few SMEs to help. Here are a couple of strategies that I find helpful, which you may want to consider:
- If using Agile, design the new system in very small chunks for your definition of “done” for a sprint. Small work units enable efficient and focused design discussions, reviews, and approvals. This approach also prevents both the implementation and SME teams from engaging in “wandering conversations” due to having to address large pieces of complex functionality.
- See if the client will consider spending extra money to increase the number of business analysts on the project.
- See if the client can accommodate an extended timeline. A like to use a Microsoft Project detailed task-level work plan show clients the relationship between resources, task efforts, and completion dates.
- Have the whole implementation team learn the legacy system and the client’s business, so they can also contribute as SMEs.
- Have the implementation team collect existing business process and technical documentation of the current state system, which can then be cut and pasted into an ALM to create detailed current state functional specifications. This approach can be a real time saver since the current state specs can be edited to develop future state specs. This process also accelerates the implementation team’s learning of the client’s business and legacy system.
- Create an agreed to daily or weekly fixed meeting schedule with the client SMEs to document the current and future state system. A fixed project meeting schedule helps everyone build into their busy work schedules time to work on the project.
- Consider communicating with SMEs and stakeholders design information via the use of prototypes using video demonstrations, which can be viewed anytime. SME and stakeholder comments can be documented by asking them to use the ALM.
- Consider using online forms and questionnaires to collect current state processes and business logic information, and to present design options for SME and stakeholder to voice their preferences. I use Microsoft forms to survey stakeholder preferences since it records everyone’s response helping to document their participation and justification for design decisions. These methods can also reduce meetings and make meetings more focused and productive.
Resistance to Change
Not everyone likes it when change is proposed or implemented. I had and insurance director who was in her job for 30 years, and limited her participation in a system replacement project even though she was the product owner. After a year of foot-dragging, it was clear that she was sabotaging the project requiring her boss to intervene. Staffs resistant change for many reasons. The two most observed reasons for resisting change are that (a) employees don’t what to change what they know how to do, and (2) people are afraid that a new system will result in them losing their jobs. With AI being built into a variety of business processes, worries about losing one’s job is becoming a realistic concern.
Mitigation strategies to cope with resistance to change requires an Organizational Change Management (OCM) program that promotes project transparency, training, a high degree of communication with everyone being impacted by the project, and involving as many stakeholders as possible in the design and testing stages of the project. Unfortunately, when the bottleneck is an employee or executive on the project team, mitigation may mean running the risk issue up the chain-of-command of the organization to address through either training, coaching, or replacement. If someone is sabotaging the project, addressing the issue with friendly executives, or the PMO project auditors, can help highlight the issue for resolution.
Risk Avoidance
The risk avoidance scenario is seen when either an executive sponsor, product owner, or SMEs want to avoid responsibility and risk for the project’s outcomes. You find they make someone else accountable for the design decisions or approvals. At the time of this writing, I had just experienced an executive product owner turn over all responsibility for the project’s design and development to business unit SMEs. Mitigating this situation was difficult and required several strategies including: (a) engaging other business unit executives, (b) high degree of communication on design decisions and issues to the product owners superiors, the entire project team, business unit executive stakeholders, business SMEs, and Steering Committee, (c) using various online approval forms to gain design review feedback and approvals from a broad group of stakeholders, and last, (d) involvement of the PMO and project auditing group. The goal was to distribute responsibility for design decision making by involving a large group of stakeholders to avoid the project team from being held responsible and accountable for a situation beyond their control and otherwise could put the project at risk.
Inter-personal Conflict
Disagreements between people at all levels in an organization and a project team is unavoidable. However, when inter-personal conflict becomes unmanageable it puts the project at risk. Conflict between team members can be addressed through coaching, project process improvements, reassignments, or having a truly troublesome person ejected from the project. Conflict between executives is more difficult to mitigate and is best left to other senior executives to address.
However, sometimes the project manager is dragged into the conflict situation and needs to decide if they can stay neutral and help the project succeed regardless of dysfunctional executive relationships. If the project manager needs to decide which camp they are going to support, my first choice is to support the executive who is championing the project. It is possible to have an executive sponsor or product owner be the cause for the project dysfunction, and in this situation, you might try to utilize a consensus of the Steering Committee to guide project decision making. A high degree of project risk, issue, progress, and design decision communications can help mitigate the situation. The PMO and project auditors can also help to guide the project through complex relationship issues that are impacting the project.
Regards, Rob
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