The Cost of Getting on the Same Page
It may surprise you to realize that the biggest part of any ERP project budget (in many cases 50% or more, of the total) is devoted to knowledge management - the extraction and migration of information between your implementation team, your consultants and your business community.
In the Planning phase, your team helps the consultants understand the business opportunities and challenges, the current processes, the desired future state and the (potentially new) organizational design.
Next comes the Design phase, where the process overviews are developed to make sure that the new processes meet critical business requirements. The users provide feedback to the consultants and your team to solidify the new design.
The consultants then Build (configure) the system and perform knowledge transfer (showing your team what they're doing and why).
During Testing, your team then uncovers data, security, work flow, reporting and transaction processing bugs within the configuration and communicates these issues to the consultants.
Once the system is stable and reliable, your team devotes several weeks to system documentation, the development of training materials and the delivery of training in preparation for Implementation.
Throughout the effort, Project and business leaders are communicating the need for the new system, the expected benefits and how the new system will affect processes, tasks and the impact on the organization - all the Communication and Change Management tasks.
In the Planning phase, your team helps the consultants understand the business opportunities and challenges, the current processes, the desired future state and the (potentially new) organizational design.
Next comes the Design phase, where the process overviews are developed to make sure that the new processes meet critical business requirements. The users provide feedback to the consultants and your team to solidify the new design.
The consultants then Build (configure) the system and perform knowledge transfer (showing your team what they're doing and why).
During Testing, your team then uncovers data, security, work flow, reporting and transaction processing bugs within the configuration and communicates these issues to the consultants.
Once the system is stable and reliable, your team devotes several weeks to system documentation, the development of training materials and the delivery of training in preparation for Implementation.
Throughout the effort, Project and business leaders are communicating the need for the new system, the expected benefits and how the new system will affect processes, tasks and the impact on the organization - all the Communication and Change Management tasks.
In some projects I've been involved in, the cost of all these knowledge management and transfer tasks is equivalent of funding four years' college tuition for 300 students! That is a LOT of money.
