You’re a busy Director or VP responsible for an equally busy key department within a large enterprise, and on your plate rests the success or failure of a project to integrate new systems into your business processes. You’re the accidental person-in-charge. You didn’t ask for it, or maybe you did, but in any case you can’t give it a lot of your attention; that’s why you have a project team.
So what are the most important things for you to ask your project team?
Before you commit to a software vendor
What does the business need and what does the software provide? Are the differences, and the resolution thereof between those two, documented and well understood?
- With the best option out there, what is still missing and how will I fix that? Does it solve my problems and give me the ROI I expect?
After project launch and for the duration of the project:
- Does the software test out the way we expected? Do users understand how to use it? If the answer is no, you have more work to do – determine why and fix it; otherwise you aren’t ready for Go Live.
Before the switch over to the new system, ask:
- Have we planned in detail for the Go Live, including what we’ll do if things go wrong? Same thing applies here – if the answer is no, or even if you sense people are glossing over problems or making excuses for not being ready, you really are not ready and therefore risk the business disruption that can turn into a disaster.
