Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software promises to track all of your company’s resources as they pass through your internal processes. A successful ERP implementation will allow you to monitor tasks in real time and, more importantly, collect valuable data at every step. This data can then yield useful insights to help you fine-tune procurement, resource management, employee allocation, and much more. To implement ERP from scratch, you’ll need to proceed through several phases. Here’s what those phases look like.  

Understanding the Phases of ERP Implementation

Initial Planning

Although the exact number of phases depends on who you ask, everyone agrees that a good ERP project starts with thorough planning. You need extensive documentation. Is every essential process documented with step-by-step instructions? Are employee roles and their interactions clearly defined and mapped out? Since ERP works by digitizing and centralizing all of your processes into one program, you have to understand those processes perfectly. Otherwise, your software will clash with workers’ expectations and create more frustration than the solution.

However, this is also a good time to stop and analyze processes to see how they can be improved. There might be unnecessary steps that you can cut or, at the very least, automate using software. Take your existing process documents and draft new versions that envision how the process will go once you’ve implemented ERP software throughout the organization. Set goals for select KPIs so you can monitor progress in the future.

Software Development

Software development is where the bulk of your ERP investment goes. ERP projects quickly go over budget when software engineers receive requests for features that weren’t considered in the original plan. That is why the first phase is so crucial. However, there will always be things you overlook during planning. Agile software development methods allow engineers to tinker and make adjustments along the way.

Once a beta version is ready, you may want to ask some of your employees to participate in a pilot program. Include a mix of tech-savvy and luddite workers for best results. Both engineers and other staff need to test out the software to find flaws and make recommendations for improvements. As an added bonus, having regular employees in the pilot group will help you when it comes time to train others.  
 

Deployment and Training

Once the development phase has run its course, you’ll proceed to deployment. The software engineers will handle the technical side of deployment, including migrating data to the new system. However, your employees need to be ready to use the new software. Developers aren’t usually the best teachers. Leverage the knowledge from the pilot group and organize a few “vacation” days where employees can experiment and play with their new software.

Tracking and Improvement

Now that everyone is on board and your software is up and running, it’s time to monitor it and make revisions. Some issues may not manifest themselves for months or even years. Keep taking suggestions and monitoring the data collected to ensure the project satisfies the goals set in your plan.

If your company needs help implementing ERP or building software from scratch, book an Intro Call with Project Genetics.

Every failing project starts with the best of intentions, but somewhere along the way, things fall apart. Maybe your team is having trouble communicating, or they’re missing deadlines. Suddenly, you realize things have gotten way out of hand. Fortunately, you can get help: at Project Genetics, we specialize in helping teams accomplish their project goals. Keep reading for five project recovery strategies to get your team back on track and headed for success.

5 Project Recovery Strategies That Work

1. Risk Assessment

Before you begin the process of recovering a derailed project, schedule a meeting with your team for risk assessment. Is it even possible to recover the project, or has the final deadline already passed? Are there enough resources to complete the project? Have the priorities changed enough to warrant a complete redesign? As the project manager, ask yourself those questions and pose them to your team. Ask for their feedback, then try to reach a group consensus on how to proceed.

2. Pinpoint the Root of the Problem

The next strategy is root cause analysis. Sit down with your team and examine what is causing the project to fail. Then, follow the problems until you reach the root cause. You may even find that some of the same issues have occurred on other failed projects. Once you identify the snags, brainstorm short- and long-term solutions you can apply to prevent the same problems from popping up again on future projects.

3. Use More Resources

If you have the funds, adding more resources or asking for more help can push a flagging project through to the finish line. However, spending more money will detract from overall profits. Plus, throwing money at the problem is no guarantee that the project will succeed. As a last resort, you can force overtime, but use caution: too much overtime can kill employee morale and motivation. Also, don’t forget to acknowledge your team’s efforts and celebrate their successes.

4. Try Fast Tracking

Are there any project tasks you can complete that aren’t dependent on other tasks? If so, try fast-tracking, also known as partial overlapping. With this technique, you start the new task right before the previous one is completed successfully. Ultimately, this method can streamline your to-do list and help you complete tasks more efficiently.

5. Get Some Fresh Eyes on The Project

Another strategy you can use to recover a derailing project is outsourcing. For example, you can ask another project manager for their opinion or advice on how to get the stalled project going again. Getting a new perspective on an old problem can result in fresh ideas or (hopefully) a solution.

From risk assessment to root cause analysis, these are five strategies to help you recover a failing project. If you’ve tried everything and you’re still stuck, the talented team at Project Genetics can help. We zero in on your specific needs and dedicate ourselves to helping you accomplish your project goals and ultimately achieve success. Contact Project Genetics today and schedule a complimentary 30-minute video chat with one of our team members. We look forward to hearing from you!

Failing projects create a great deal of stress as you face conflict arising from unmet expectations and damage to your reputation. It can be easier to look back on a project and realize where it went wrong than notice the warning signs at the moment, but if you stay proactive and look for the indicators that a project is getting off-track, you can begin project recovery quickly and save the project.

Signs Your Project Is Off-Track and in Need of Project Recovery

Failure to Hit Milestones

When your project’s timeline was created, your team received targets to hit. A delayed delivery here or there might not be a big deal, but if missed deadlines start to stack up, your project is not headed in the right direction. Failure to meet early milestones can quickly roll into delaying later milestones until your entire timeline needs to be reworked.

Sometimes, the people responsible for setting the timeline overestimated the speed it would take to get things done, while other times, you simply hit unforeseen difficulties. This can also be a symptom of scope creep as the parameters of a project keep changing. Regardless of the reason, though, continuing to move deadlines will result in unhappy clients and increased expenses.

Bloating Budgets

Every project has a point where it ceases to be worthwhile, and every component that comes in over budget carries you closer to that point. You cannot always avoid unforeseen expenses, but when they start to stack up, you know a serious error has occurred in planning or execution. A budget spiraling out of control is one of the clearest indicators that your project is headed toward failure.

Competing Visions

The successful completion of a project relies on a team that pushes together toward the same end goal. If your team cannot clearly articulate that goal, or worse, if they have competing descriptions of that goal, you can anticipate chaos and conflict. Making sure everyone is on the same page can prevent many more serious problems.

Lack of Excitement

When you meet with team members, do they seem disinterested and distracted? That disinterest will spill over into the quality of the overall project, so make sure you’re getting everyone on board with the vision of the project and clearly communicating their role in it. If this is a need on your project, our proprietary process can put the right person on the job who will fit your needs and earn your team’s respect.

Excess Overtime

Overtime can be a good short-term solution as you sprint to complete a particular aspect of a project. If you find your employees regularly working a lot of overtime, though, it indicates that the project is lagging. It can be easier to hide the lag with overtime than to fix the underlying problems; however, this isn’t sustainable long-term, and those unsolved problems will surface elsewhere eventually.

Watch out for signs that your project is getting off track, and you can proactively address the problems and give yourself a better chance of recovering. And remember, you don’t have to do it alone. Contact us at Project Genetics for a free consultation, and our experienced and skilled experts can assess your project and implement practical solutions to help you recover quickly.

Mergers and acquisitions are notoriously disruptive. It’s nearly impossible for the average company to anticipate, on its own, all the possible problems that could arise. According to the Harvard Business Review, somewhere between 70% and 90% of all M&As fail, and the fact that some of the biggest failures of all time were between powerful, successful companies (like the Bank of American/Countrywide failure in 2008 or the Google/Motorola failure of 2012) indicates that nearly every company needs outside help to preserve project efficiency.

Three Ways Mergers and Acquisitions Could Potentially Disrupt Efficiency

Through Lost Trust

Your human capital is your most important investment, but it’s all too easy to forget about the people during an M&A. While upper management might be thrilled about the change, this doesn’t mean that stakeholders and staff closer to the bottom are very excited.

If you lose the trust of the people at the top, or at the bottom, you’ve just tanked your efficiency. People who don’t understand their place in what’s happening or how it will benefit them are not inclined to work hard. People who are worried about their jobs are inefficient, and their focus is drawn away from tasks and projects.

Through Lack of Due Diligence

You must follow through on certain things to ensure a successful M&A, but it’s hard for us, as humans, not to take a shortcut. All mammals instinctively avoid expending energy whenever possible to preserve it for future needs. As humans, our enormous brains both allow us to understand the dangers of shortcuts and, ironically, use up more of our energy than any other single bodily function, making us ultimately more prone to taking a shortcut if we think it will allow us to expend less mental energy.

Even those who know they shouldn’t be taking shortcuts are still tempted to do so, making it one of the biggest issues for M&As out there. Make sure your people understand that efficiency isn’t the same thing as cutting a corner and that cutting corners actually causes more problems in the long run. Leverage your management consulting partner to keep an eye on the process and ensure things stay on track.

Through Failure to Think Through Integration

Your team needs to be thinking through smooth integration at every step in the M&A process. Failure to properly integrate, and thus inadvertently create an inefficient work environment, is perhaps the most famous of all M&A failure culprits. Integration is something you need to plan out in detail before, during, and after the M&A.

There’s too much that goes into this process to list it all here, but at the least, you need to think about short and long-term needs, benefits, and processes when it comes to hiring, look at redundancies and plan out layoffs and severance, evaluate what technology you’ll need for merging systems and organizing things, and develop a training plan and new review procedures.

Keep Project Efficiency on Track

A lot can go wrong in an M&A, but when things go right, your business will thrive. Talk to us at Project Genetics about how we can help: we’re a proven leader in project management solutions, and we can keep yours on track.

The larger your organization, the more complex your projects are. Navigating that complexity is crucial if your enterprise hopes to continue to scale. What worked in your company’s startup days likely ceased to be useful between 50-100 employees. The same is true when you reach 500-1000 and again when you reach the tens of thousands. If you find that projects have become harder to execute successfully, you might have reached a wall. Rethink your enterprise project management strategy.

4 Keys to Effective Enterprise Project Management

1. Standardize Project Processes

Just as a taller building requires stronger support, larger projects need more structure. Structure for projects comes in the form of your processes. Large enterprises have already codified processes at lower levels for daily operations, but they have often neglected to standardize processes for upper levels.

By the time your upper management team exceeds a dozen people, you should have thoroughly documented project management processes. If not, you won’t be able to accurately track project progress and hold middle management accountable for executing your upper management’s vision. Besides, you’ll also find yourself wasting time in meetings and on phone calls as you’ll need to check in on projects more often.

2. Involve Stakeholders at All Levels

This is easily one of the worst mistakes you can make in project management. However, we see it often because it’s a holdover from the medium-sized business days. As your organization grows, there is more distance between the C-suite and the ground floor. Executives may think they know what’s best for everyone, but because they’ve been out of touch with the reality on the ground, their project ideas could be doomed to fail from the very start.

Identify who will be affected by the project the most, and then consult them. For example, if you’re planning a CRM implementation, your customer service reps and sales staff will be affected the most. They should be invited to participate in project design and testing, and even take the lead in training. Don’t just cherry-pick star employees; even a new recruit can lend valuable insight into project design.

3. Track Progress With Project Management Software

There’s only so much data a human can handle. Eventually, you’re going to need technology. If you’ve standardized your project management processes, you can develop software to digitize those processes and centralize data. This way, upper management can monitor progress without having to check in personally every time they need an update. If Dominos Pizza can make a pizza tracker that keeps customers from calling incessantly to ask about their food, your company can do the same with its projects.

Be careful with turnkey solutions. They promise a straightforward implementation, but they can also be inflexible and incompatible with your organization.

4. Build a Project Management Team

Many companies have appointed a Chief Project Officer (CPO) and created a project management department. If you’ve got excellent project managers, it may make sense to put them together and dedicate all of their efforts to projects exclusively.

However, if you don’t have the experience in your upper management team to build your own project management office, you can bring in outside help. Book an Intro Call with Project Genetics to learn how we can help you take project management to the next level.

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikuhiro Nonaka wrote a paper for the Harvard Business Review. “The New New Product Develop Game” applied rugby terms to organizational methods in developing and delivering products. Although rugby is foreign to most Americans, terms such as “scrum” and “agile” struck a chord. More than three decades later, companies looking to create the ideal project management office still struggle to differentiate between concepts such as Scaled Agile Framework and Scrum, though. Here’s a primer.

What Is Rugby and Why Does It Relate To PMO Implementation?

What Is Scrum?

What Is Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe?

Rugby scrums that overcome rough patches are just one aspect of a team’s strategy. Ultimately, the goal is for scrum members to get the ball in the hands of more agile players who can deliver it to the opponent’s end. For this to occur, the entire team must align in a formation covering the breadth of the field, enabling it to exploit any opportunities.

Similarly, SAFe is the overarching framework of a PMO. While Scrum concentrates on a specific task, Scalable Agile Frameworks tackle the project as a whole. It aims to deliver the project in a timely and efficient manner.

Are Scrum and SAFe Structured Differently?

Scrum and Scalable Agile Frameworks usually consist of three tiers that function similarly. A Scrum team handles each task, or sprint, led by a Scrum Master who, in turn, reports to the Product Owner. The Product Owner is responsible for planning and organizing each sprint as well as liaising with company management and employees.

SAFe can be likened to an enlarged version of Scrum with three levels: the visual portfolio (information and data stream), program, and team. The significant difference between SAFe and Scrum is that the former’s overarching purview allows it to perceive and resolve problems the latter will miss in its limited scope.

Implementing your PMO relies on identifying the areas that require Scrums and installing a Scalable Agile Framework that can read and adapt to changing conditions. To avoid downtime, conflicting departmental standards, and other inefficiencies, put the right people on the job from day one. Contact Project Genetics for a consultation today.