How to be more successful when delivering an ERP or large technology change…
“You won't find anyone who has a deeper, more genuine passion for change than Curium. They focus on implementing in a way that is always in the best interests of the people. It's Change done the right way, which is extremely hard to do." (Matt Hemming, Customer Experience Director, Waterlogic)
Here are 5 crucial things to consider when delivering your ERP:
1. Put your People First
Sounds obvious but it is rarely done. Don’t just tick the box of providing resource from your team to the project, but challenge yourself by asking: “Who do I trust to represent me and my team to get the most out of this investment?”
Once they’ve been onboarded, whether they are going to form part of the core delivery team, or are a Champion in the business; train them. Get them upskilled in the things they’ll need to be successful in their role. That could be ‘technical project elements’ like Requirements Gathering, Business Impact Assessments, Data Migration, or Testing. Or ‘change management elements’ like Resilience, Facilitation, Decision Making and Teaming (here’s a great video from Amy Edmondson on Teaming)
When you tell the story, make your people the hero of it, not your change programme. Pitch it on how this will help them achieve their goals and ambitions, the programme is purely a guide to help them along the way.
Watch this webinar, which was streamed to hundreds of people from Birmingham Tech Week on putting your people at the heart of transformation.
2. Make the customer a supplier
This will change everything for you.
Establish responsibilities in a way that helps your key user communities understand that they are not only a Customer of the change, but a Supplier of it. This means that they understand from day 1 that they have as much responsibility in facilitating the successful and timely delivery of the programme as the programme itself.
After all, they have rich business knowledge, will want to influence key decisions, and ultimately are the ones who will be using the solution after it has been delivered.
This is definitely a mindset shift that can seem alien at first, but once up and running, it proves to be liberating. It is about putting people in control of their destiny – helping them shape their future within the constraints of the scope of the programme. In doing so, the business starts to pull for the change.
3. Premortem
This is a brilliant and simple technique to gain business-driven insights into what could make this project go off course in a meaningful and actionable way. When you explore this with your business, they will often provide you with the insights needed to engage them, on their terms, to gain the commitment required to successfully deliver.
To quote Gary Kline writing in Harvard Business Review “A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.”
Read Gary’s full article.
4. Establish a Team CODE to speak hard truths
Talking hard truths to stakeholders is paramount. If you can establish psychological safety in the team, where no-one fears speaking up, you can certainly create an environment where stakeholders not only accept, but fully expect to have tough conversations.
Think of the Team CODE as an identity, the rules of engagement for shaping the project team and how you are going to act.
Connect: Do you understand your people? Understand the environment so your people feel connected in order to bring them on the change journey with you.
Organise: How are you as a team going to be organised, what mechanisms and processes do you need? Meeting cadence? Feedback mechanisms? Comms channels?
Drive: Define clearly what you are there to deliver and what difference it will make when done. What is the big goal that lets everyone know where you are going and guides how you deliver the project and change to get there?
Explore: Possibility thinking. What can you do to disrupt your own thinking, dispel fixed beliefs, and try new things? Define ways to test and learn as a team. If you make it an expectation to come up with ideas, you will be amazed at how much innovation your team will create.
5. Codify your approach, for us it’s through our 5 lenses and their respective processes
Delivering an ERP is perhaps the hardest and riskiest project organisations face. It is imperative to get everyone on the same page at the very beginning.
We introduced our 5 lenses for ERP deployment that drives business engagement alongside technical delivery throughout the project.
The benefit of codifying your approach is massive. From being able to prepare in advance for future steps, to everyone in your team and business sharing the same language and having a common understanding of what is required.
“Taking a step back, you have successfully implemented a new, complex, highly integrated business system, with a wide breadth of functionality, into a major market, in the midst of an international pandemic, without hands-on support from the core project team and system experts.
From my experience you have achieved this with very few business impacts, no significant functionality misses and we have a system that is fundamentally stable and performant. Across the business system implementations I have encountered, this is right up there in the top 10% of the most successful. A fantastic achievement from everyone involved!”
Waterlogic
The power of a coaching culture
‘There is no doubt that moving to a coaching approach for leadership has had an enormous impact on engagement and performance of our business. The fact that we have done this in the middle of a pandemic has meant the impact is even more meaningful.’
But what is a coaching approach to leadership? Let’s explore this real life example.
In our experience, a great deal of people with hierarchical responsibility (i.e. have people reporting to them) struggle to articulate the difference between the ‘3 hats’ they inevitably wear: Leader, Manager, Coach.
The challenge then becomes twofold:
- How to recognise a situation that requires one of these hats.
- And then what to practically do and how to behave in the moment to get the desired outcome.
In this organisation, we had a group of team managers who very much focused on ‘management’, that is the task at hand, organisation of the work, delivering to the required standard etc.
When team members asked for support, it was met more with ‘here’s the answer’, based on years of experience.
As a result, the individual was spending 70% of their time involved in ‘doing’ the work or directly influencing the doing of the work.
Following our Leader as Coach programme, this shift moved significantly.
The Team Manager was now spending 30% to 40% of their time ‘doing’ and the remainder was coaching and leading the team.
Coaching Simplified
So what is coaching? In two words: Awareness and Responsibility.
If you are helping someone to gain awareness and support them so they take responsibility for change, you are coaching. It really is that simple…on paper at least.
In practice, under pressure, it is harder to embed than you might think.
But when you do, the results will speak for themselves. Engagement, initiative and performance are just a few factors that have been shown to radically improve in a coaching culture.
We help organisations achieve faster sustainable transformation by combining strategic advice with hands-on delivery support.
Our experienced specialists work alongside leaders and teams to build trust, shift mindsets and embed behaviours that drive lasting change. By blending practical expertise with a people-centred approach, we help organisations navigate complexity, accelerate performance, reduce risk and align around a clear vision for the future. The result is greater ownership, stronger capability and transformation that not only delivers results but continues to create value long after implementation.
Let’s Start a Conversation
Tell us your story, your challenge. What are you trying to change?
