16/11/2023
Recently I was working with a customer and was attending a workshop on the requirements for the new system from a Financial perspective. It was interesting to hear the interaction between the vendor consultants and the customer, and unsurprisingly the questions coming from the customer that were clearly being flavoured by their experience in their legacy application. This is an age old dilemma facing all new system implementors and their customers – how do you firstly get the customers head out of their existing world, whilst at the same time ensuring that the vendor’s consultants don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
Like everything where two parties may not yet be on the same page, the answer lies in increasing communication, education and experience. Most vendor methodologies immediately launch into understanding the customers business, which is a good and important thing to do, but neglect the opportunity to raise their customers awareness of their new operating environment. Many vendors offer online and classroom training at the start of projects but typically this training is generic and theory based, rather than offering the opportunity of practical application in the context of the customer’s market.
Additionally, if you think about the learning curves, the task for implementation consultants to learn a new business environment is relatively easy as typically they do it several times a year – a customer team though sometimes only does it once or twice in a lifetime. Therefore, their learning curve is much steeper.
One way I have seen some companies approach this is to elevate the customer’s knowledge level as the first and number one task when starting a new project. They will use templates to upload customer data into a vertically aligned environment and then spend some time educating the customer and focusing them on their new world, rather than asking about their old one. This approach is a much better way to orient the customer team at the start of an implementation and sets the scene for building a new solution that is truly based on best practices and new possibilities, rather than old limitations.
Something to think about then when considering starting an implementation of a new system – consider re-educating and enabling the customer team first, then start to think about the specifics of their business. You will be able to have much shorter and more meaningful conversations on important topics, because the teams are already much more closed aligned.
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