An Affordable Introduction for Executives

We offer an affordable half-day introduction to both the problem and its solution for executives.

Who should attend? The people who will decide the future direction of the company’s major software functions. Also, managers who have a significant stake in what those systems do, because more than anything else, system success is a matter of incorporating these people’s critical expectations.

Who should not attend? The technical people who are the focus of our workshops, especially business analysts and their immediate management. This Introduction is not a compressed version of our workshop material. It is a high-level survey of the problem and its solution, and it never descends into the details of the technical work to be done. For the people who will have to do that work, it will raise a great many questions without providing any answers at all.

A 100,000-foot look at our 50,000-foot presentation. Let us compare an ERP* implementation to building a factory, and also compare significantly upgrading an ERP system to modifying a factory. Building and upgrading factories are well-understood problems. If Parable Industries, Inc. sets out to do either thing – let’s say, to build a new plant from scratch – it knows what it’s getting itself into.

The most important thing it knows is why it is about to undertake this very significant project. Companies can always come up with reasons for doing whatever they’ve embarked upon but Parable Industries really does know why it has decided to build that plant.
Before an architect is hired, every department that will use the factory has offered its input and argued its case. Yes, we understand that Heat Treating would prefer to be closest to Grinding but so would Milling, and for equally sound reasons. Painful compromises will be proposed, debated, tweaked, abandoned and succeeded by new compromises, until everyone agrees to what they’ll be getting: not everyone will like it but they will understand it, they will be able to start planning how their departments will function in their new home.
When Parable Industries selects and then hires a firm of architects, it is secure in the knowledge that it has explained exactly what it expects. The contract between Parable and its architects lays these expectations out in legally binding language. Everybody knows what they have to do. Even though many details remain to be worked out, everybody knows approximately when each stage of work will be completed and about how much it will eventually cost.
When the architects deliver the plans, each of the stakeholders who provided the original requirements reviews them. The plans include many things that the company’s functional leadership won’t understand, but they don’t need to understand them. Among the stress calculations and the conduit and the plumbing, the supervisor of Heat Treating can find her department, and all the other departments, too. She can see where her machines will be laid out and can verify that they will be spaced as she has directed. If she has been promised a twelve-foot wide aisle from Heat Treat straight through Milling to Grinding but the architects have given her only ten feet or have curved the aisle around the tool crib, the broken promise will be plain as day. She will have every right to protest and get it fixed, and even though her colleagues may grumble privately that she should have been able to live with the plans as drawn, nobody can deny that the architects owe her a fix – and owe it contractually, to the company as a whole.
When the plans are accepted and the work goes out for bids, everyone involved understands how to make the chosen contractor responsible for building exactly what’s on the blueprints, for an agreed cost and to an agreed schedule. Sure, the company’s lawyers get their turn at the contract, but they don’t overrule anything the blueprints say: they just make sure that if the blueprints aren’t followed, somebody other than Parable Industries will pick up the cost of fixing the job.

Suppose that at any point in this process you were to suggest to Parable Industries that they had surrendered control of the project, first to the architects, then to the contractors. They would be quick to point out that the process they followed guaranteed that the architects and contractors were compelled to work toward Parable’s well understood, well defined objectives. If you tried every manager in the company, you’d get pretty much the same answer from every one of them.

Now let’s play a game of make believe. Let’s pretend that Parable Industries sets out to build a new factory, but using the usual ERP system acquisition process. How would the story be different?

Although somebody within Parable Industries has decided that a new factory is necessary, the basis for that decision is kept private. Even heads of departments are pacified with generalities and bromides: in ways that are never fully articulated, the current legacy factory is touchingly old fashioned and out of date. Therefore we are facing this major new challenge. The company needs a new factory to adapt (unspecified) new technology to (somehow) stay competitive. If the company is to remain a world class provider, only this new factory will allow it to adapt acknowledged world class best practices. If anyone claims to not understand this fully, the designated management spokesperson will be happy to repeat it over and over again.
Everyone is invited to submit wish lists, so that the architects who will be hired to design the new factory can learn what is important to Parable Industries – and to get everyone excited about the new factory experience to come.
Parable obtains promises and references from several leading architects. Naturally, Parable is drawn to the more prominent of these: if their factories aren’t the very best factories, how could they have risen to the top? And so it seems, for none of the firms is shy about acknowledging the unique virtues of its work. How to choose amidst so much talent? In the end, infatuation follows its usual if devious course, and the very fittest firm of architects emerges.
On the appointed day, everyone gathers for the Presentation of the Blueprints. The Architect in Chief reverently lays them on the conference table while all the Subordinate Architects murmur approvingly. The Managing Architect rises to reveal the contents. Here is the curd separation line. Here is the sludge regeneration unit. Are there any questions?

Well, perhaps a couple. With much embarrassed hemming and hawing, Parable’s VP of Operations raises his hand. This is very impressive but… well, it’s just that Parable has never been in the cheese business, or the sludge business either for that matter. So they’ve never done curd separation or sludge regeneration before, and…well, it’s not entirely clear why they’ll be doing it in the new factory...

An awkward moment for some, perhaps, but the Managing Architect is reassurance itself. He explains, gently but confidently: so confidently in fact that everyone sees that he’s been hoping to answer this very question. You’ll remember, he muses, that you required nothing less than a world class facility? Well, that’s what you’re getting, and part of the reason you’re getting it is that curd separation and sludge regeneration are what world class means these days. It doesn’t matter whether you see this right now, today – which is fortunate, because such understanding only comes with experience. What matters is that you will come to see it in time, as your new factory is, ah, implemented.

That should have done it, shouldn’t it? Who wouldn’t be satisfied with that? Well, it turns out that the supervisor of Heat Treating isn’t. In her stubborn and undiplomatic way, she virtually demands an explanation of where her department fits in these wonderful blueprints. Amid the embarrassed mumbles, a Specialist Architect rises to explain. Legacy heat treating is a thing of the past. The curd separation process delivers all the benefits of legacy heat treating but according to the new world class paradigm. This will become clear in the user acceptance phase of the upcoming factory implementation. He, the Specialist Architect, will personally see to it that the supervisor of Heat Treating is convinced, as she shall be. But, alas, it is beyond all our powers to convince her today…because her new world class factory is so full of best practices and lessons learned that, without prolonged and specialized training and, especially, without experience, its workings approach magic itself. But it’s OK that she can’t yet understand it at this exciting point in her career, because that’s why he is here, that’s what Architects are for.
It remains to hire the Implementing Contractors. The details of this process are gruesomely boring. Suffice it to say that the successful bidder is required to swear that they understand the blueprints and cannot fail to implement them on time and for the contracted amount; that to ensure that this happens, they will diligently record their progress according to their unique, proprietary system of multicolored metrics, which they will submit for Parable’s enlightenment and adoration every Friday – at which time, of course, 7.2% of the contracted price will come due, according to unchangeable, time-honored world class construction practices.

This joke may not be all that funny but it is repeated every day in the ERP trade. Its victims fall for the proposition that since they themselves are not software experts, they must surrender full control to outsiders who know nothing about their business. But this is just sleight of hand. Those same victims do much more complicated things every day: they have factories built and modernized, they develop new products, they open new markets, they adopt new materials and technologies. To do these things they rent the experts they need but they never turn their businesses over to them. It is only the mystique of the software industry and its limitless self-regard that persuades them that business software projects are so far beyond them that they must turn their companies’ futures over to strangers.

Our half-day introduction for executives presents this process as it actually happens, not in metaphorical terms. Attendees learn how and why companies surrender control of major software acquisitions and implementations. They learn the business steps that lead to this surrender and the business steps required to prevent it. They learn, in general terms, the technical activities that must support these business steps; they learn what these activities are and why they are necessary. Lastly, they learn how to plan to undertake such a project successfully, and – possibly most valuable of all – how to participate in it effectively once it’s under way.

* Or CRM, or any other major business system that crosses functional boundaries.