Business change in a world before software.
In my father’s time when I would visit him at the office, there would a team of secretaries who would be producing endless reams of paper which would be stored in paper filing cabinets. Whenever my Dad needed to refer to anything, he could retrieve the file, organised alphabetically and flip through the pages till he found what he wanted.
Business change in relation to software.
When software projects go wrong.
I went to a conference a few years a go from a Prince 2 practitioner and he shared with us a story of how he tried to facilitate a session dealing with a software solution for the NHS covering the south of England. He had 43 different stakeholders in the room all wanting different outcomes from the solution. He knows right then and there it would fail as you can’t get consensus from such a diverse set of interested parties. The government cancelled the project in 2007 at a cost of 8.9 billion pound which was a substantial amount of the overall government debt at that stage.
This is where an exercise to analyse all the business requirements and dependant systems is to be conducted to fully appreciate all the different aspects involved. From the business function and technology, to company culture and stakeholder expectations, all have to be managed like a giant juggling trapeze act to bring all the pieces into place. The first in this exercise is to gather all the business requirements to get a global picture of what is involved.
About the author:
Malcolm Ford has over 10 years’ experience implementing ERP software across the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of sectors from manufacturing, export, distribution centres, construction and international law.
