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ERP Selection

Header quotes The first Challenge of your Project Header quotes

How to lay
the Foundation for
the Success of your Project As early as the Preparation Phase

There is a persistent rumor that the preparation of ERP and CRM projects only begins when a system is presented and vendors are involved. However, you make the most important decisions critical to success much earlier - namely at the beginning of the preparation phase. How does this realization benefit you?

Success Factors for ERP and CRM Projects have shifted

Change stops at nothing: over the last 5 to 10 years, the factors for the success or failure of implementation projects have also changed significantly. Why is that? In the past, the focus was still on the purely technical aspects - the keywords here are system failures and performance. This focus has now shifted to largely organizational aspects. This also includes the willingness and ability to change business processes, mindset and corporate culture.

The shift can also be recognized by the fact that ERP and CRM projects in the past were pure IT projects where the responsibility lay with the IT management. Nowadays, however, such projects can be found with commercial management - sometimes even with executive management. Due to the new focus, it now makes sense to take a new approach to the preparation phase of the project.

Today, Preparation starts much earlier - even before the Choice of Vendor

What does solid preparation of your organizational project look like? This starts much earlier than with traditional, more technology-driven projects. And it is now imperative to involve different roles in a project if success is your only realistic option. After all, your organization consists of many teams and people with different interests who are all directly or indirectly affected by the decisions or changes.

Ideally, you should create the essential foundations and prerequisites for your project before you make initial contact with potential vendors. You can use ten key questions as a guide.

These 10 Questions will help you to prepare your Project in a Structured Way

  1. What strategic goals do you want to achieve with your initiative?

  2. How can you define these goals as attractively as possible so that every single employee can understand them?

  3. How can you secure the active participation of the entire management team?

  4. Who is responsible at the top level - both for success and for theoretical failure?

  5. Will this project be the only project on which 100% focus is placed? Or will you tackle several projects at the same time?

  6. Do you adapt the new software to your way of working or are you ready to change your business processes towards the best practices of the software?

  7. Are you opting for a “big-bang” approach or does it make more sense to carry out your project in many individual “baby steps”?

  8. What are the biggest risks of failure and how can you minimize or even completely eliminate them?

  9. How can you motivate your teams to share their best ideas with the project team?

  10. How can you organize communication in such a way that you involve the entire company at an early stage?

Lay the Foundations for your Project Success early on - with the right Partners and a Motivated Team

When preparing for a project, it is not only essential that you answer these questions for yourself. It is at least as important to share the answers to these questions with the entire organization because an implementation project always involves a lot of people and they must be able to understand your comprehensive project goals and decisions. After all, how is your team supposed to show the necessary motivation and develop synergies without knowing exactly what you want to achieve with your ERP project?

The new approach is also advantageous with regard to your potential suppliers and implementation partners. You can also inform them in a more targeted way about what you want to achieve with your project. This makes the cooperation even more efficient. Provided, of course, that you have the right strategic partners at your side - who will accompany you through all the ups and downs in the long term.

Remember this rule of thumb: the final project result always consists 90 percent of the preparation. So your chances are good that you will achieve better project results with this new approach. This is because you are laying the foundation stone for your later project success at a very early stage.