Pirmin's Podcast : IT - ERP - Projects 33 years of experience - 99 thoughts, a weekly podcast

#40 A team needs time to build and grow If you have a larger team on the implementation, internals and externals, you can‘t create a team by defining it. It needs time to connect, build and grow. If these people never worked to-gether „just a fancy kick-off“ or one „team building event“ is not enough. They need time to connect. Let them connect in common lunch breaks, dinners. Support them in havi...

# 39 Don’t start when you do not have the resources Make sure that on the project start you have the needed per-sons for the project. They need to be on the one hand available but also be trained on your business. Finding the people during the project will make it critical to be „on time“. Also make sure that it is the right person.  Early backfilling for people who will „soon move to the project“...

#38 Empower the team A crucial part of the project is decision taking and driving the directions. Empower the team and the team members to drive decision and create new processes. Create a culture of change.  For this reason, it is so important to have the “right” the team, those who “know the processes” or those who know where they want to go in the future. If you only have “those who know the pr...

#37 Use the best on job  When it comes to the creation of the team, we need people who can do the job. Make sure that you use the best for this job from your organization! This may hurt, but only if you select the best persons you can get the best results. One mistake often done is, that the „Best in Job”, maybe the purchasing team lead, is so highly involved in the daily business, that he sends h...

#36Free the resources  Make sure you can free the needed internal resources. Having critical key roles covered with people who are attributed “50% of their time” for the ERP will not work. They need to be fully attributed and committed to this critical task. Prepare the back-fill of these early enough, to make sure that the replacement person is trained well enough to support daily business. Some...

#35 An ERP implementation is enough  Typically, an ERP implementation challenges a company to its max. On the resources side manpower will be, apart from fi-nancial restrictions, critical. There will be many operational resources involved either directly with elaborating the new/adjusted business processes or indirectly by supporting the persons who too took over their business /operational work,...

# 34 An ERP implementation is like a heart surgery An ERP is by its straightforward meaning „Enterprise Re-source Planning“ in most cases the core system to maintain your business processes. Implementing this or deeply changing it is like an open-heart surgery. You need to be aware of the risks, the work ahead but also having the confidence that the implementation will be successful. Therefore, on...

Watch it till the end, and next time when you have breakfast, think of the complexity # 33 Give me what I want not what I asked for The typical problem is that the requirements are not clearly defined which leads to a different solution. Make sure that the persons involved in the requirements definition understand the business case, understand to communicate this requirement to different stakehold...

# 32 Systems should make work easier Always keep in mind that you need to generate value with your solutions. Sounds too obvious. Not because having a fancy thing makes it a good thing. People like easy and fail proof things that don’t need too much thinking.  Often, we tend to forget what the customer wants and deliver a technical solu-tion. Today there is a little mistake in it, do you find it?...

Double episode ! There's no (Excel) Heaven without (Excel) Hell   # 30 Excel is heaven In many companies, Excel is the wonder tool! When you look around the things that can be done by Excel, it’s sometimes amazing that there are other tools in the world. As often read, Excel is not an ERP ;).  But you should not underestimate what can be done by an Excel expert. But also be sure that you are...

# 29 Don‘t waste time in technology  This is the opposite of „let technology do the job“. Sometimes we tend to make everything automated or system driven. There are cases where you need to think about it. Does it make sense to spend 2 days in preparing a data upload, testing when you only have to upload 10 records and can type this in in 1 h? Is the data cleansing more time consuming to prepare an...

# 28 Let technology do the (dumb) job If you work on a complex project or complex technology, try to make the machine do the dumb jobs. There are many things that can easily be automated, trained to tools and applications. The more of the simple tasks you transfer to these little help-ers, the more time you have for the complex things.  It’s like always a fully unscripted recording !  Happy to get...

# 27 Multi sources for messaging create confusion If you use reminders / messages generated by workflow or systems, try to keep them to a needed minimum as they will sooner or later be ignored. Try also to avoid to have these mes-saged from multiple sources / different communication ways. They all look different, requesting different actions. The more you have different ones, the more likely is th...

# 26  Be careful with workflows and reminders Workflows can be a great tool to steer and control the execution of a business process where multiple people are involved. One great thing about workflows is, that the workflow engine can send messages to the persons who are in charge of the execution of the next step. Just like the „be careful with standard messages“, be careful with these. If the wor...

# 25 Be careful with standard messages popping up  We all love to make sure that we did all correct. So often, we have the desire to have a reminder popping up asking us, “Are you sure that XXX is correct?” The intention is good, keeping the user awake and potentially reduce errors, but on the other hand, the more we have these questions and we answer them with “yes/click ok,” the less we look at...

# 24 Don’t over guide Typically “assistants” or user guided processes are needed in early phases of a project. Just like a step-by-step workflow, asking you questions, guiding you or offer pre-filled values. Most of these guided processes then include drop down lists to select something and then “click ok” go to next screen. In most cases, these assistants will have a lot of explanatory infor-mati...

# 23 Digital s**t does not smell… That’s all What is the difference between analog s**t and digital s**t? The analog one sticks at your shoes and smells... on the other hand, the digital one sticks on you but doesn’t smell. If you don’t do your homework and check what goes wrong in your old way of working and seek to understand why it’s going wrong, you will just implement the old/analog way. This...

# 22 Don‘t make all your processes bullet proof Don’t try to make all your processes and exceptions bullet-proof. This will only increase the complexity of the implemen-tation and complexity is the enemy of stability, budget and success. Make your few core processes tank-cannon proof! If your employees can rely that a defined standard process is working stable and predictable, they can handle the...

# 21  Don’t try to reach everything in one run When you start your project, the ambitions and motivation to change and go for the best are high. Even if aiming for the stars is needed to achieve best results, you need to be realistic enough to focus on what is needed. You will not reach any perfect result in one shot! Create something that is working. Give the team a success. Start with a minimum...

# 20 Don’t change / widen your scope Even though you should be open to increase the functionality, integration or usability of a solution, don’t change the scope once the project is started! Everybody tends to change or in-crease the project scope during the implementation phase as we all are learning and seeing that what we originally defined is not sufficient. Changing / adjusting the scope shou...

# 19  Aim for the stars As your business vision is a vision and may never be achieved, your project vision must be open and wide. Don’t exclude ideas or solutions at the beginning. Think about all the integra-tion possibilities or features that would be great to use. As long as you stay realistic and know that aiming for the stars may result in landing on the moon, all is good. If you block yourse...

#18Coca Cola is not Pepsi  One difficult thing for people is to imagine similarity or mak-ing abstractions. A Cola beverage is mainly water, sugar (or substitute), color, flavor, CO2. (Some details missing  ... don’t hate me for that). If you now discuss at Pepsi a software im-plementation where you use the (perfect) slides you made for a Coca Cola project, the audience will in 90 % of the cases c...

# 17 A partner is a partner  If you choose to implement a larger software project, you should consider the role of external persons / your implementa-tion partner. Complex software implementations need a deep understanding in your business and a deep trust from you in your partners. You should consider your implementation part-ner as partner not as a vendor/contractor! Same applies for other invol...

#16 Stay with your methods Once you start implementing a major software solution you will choose an implementation method, agile, scrum, waterfall, a special method from your partner, data first, logic first or what else is on the market and you think suits your business case best. All of these methods have shown that they work, at least for the business case they were developed.  Make sure you ha...

# 15 If a plan will fail, why should I plan? Good question. Like a famous quote in military lessons „No plan will survive the first contact with the enemy“ (attributed as quote to many historical military persons). This has been proven by many battle plans in history, but military does not stop making plans. Are they stupid? Wasting time with plans? No they are highly intelligent! (However you can...