August Connections Video: The second leg of the journey

In last month’s video, I discussed the relationship between ERP and business transformation, and the first step of that journey: measuring readiness.

This month I want to take a look at the second leg of this journey: business assessment.
Often companies want to jump right in and evaluate solutions. That’s not the best next step, however.

Strategically assessing your people, processes and technology before evaluating software ensures that you save money and time further down the road.

Here at Syte, we’ve found that with the right people in the room, we can uncover what’s working well — and what’s not.

And that makes all the difference in your company’s long-term success.

Video Translation: 

Hi, Erin, CEO at Syte Consulting Group. In our last discussion, I cued up a conversation that’s going to be over a four-part series talking about business transformation. Noot digital transformation, which is just a piece of it, but the bigger story we call business transformation. We talked about it last time as a road trip, a journey, if you will, and it usually is a four-step process for our clients at Syte Consulting Group.

We want to talk through each of those steps in this series because each step ensures that you get to where you’re going in a more efficient way. We want to talk about less cost and with less burnout of your people, which to us really matters. We talked about the first step in this journey being measuring your level of readiness for business transformation. We talked about how taking 30 days or less to really assess your readiness from a capabilities and capacity perspective can really set you up for success.

The second piece is business assessment. The third is solution evaluation. And lastly, implementation of those solutions to really just really hit it out of the park from a long term success perspective and meeting strategic initiatives as intended. Today, we want to talk about business assessment, why it matters and why we do it. One of the things we find is companies like to jump right to the evaluation phase of the solutions before they have an assessment of exactly where the business is at or where the people are at relative to those processes.

What’s working well, what’s not? Where are efficiencies? Where are things broken? Where things being done manually? Asking all of these questions, the way we like to approach this is workshop-style and interview-style. We get all the right people in the room. We look at the critical and core business processes that drive your business, and we have conversations and map out together in a collaborative way exactly how you’re doing it today and maybe how it could be done better in the future.

What are the most important things to address as we start to build the requirements set for your solutions? The reason we do that now instead of later in the process is because it saves time and money. It all comes down to that. What we find is companies come to us and saying to us that they want to evaluate solutions or they want to implement this solution and they want to dive right in. The problem with that is when you do that, you’ll eventually hit a spot in either process, evaluation or implementation where you’re faced with looking at the people in the processes.

We have to ask them “Where are you at?” and “Where are you trying to go?” If you do that upfront and early, not only do you drive yourself toward a better set of requirements for choosing the solutions in the first place, but you ensure that it takes far with less time to consider when you do it upfront versus having to pull up stakes in the middle of an evaluation or an implementation and ask all of these questions. In fact, what we have found is companies come to us fairly often and ask us to help, if you will, rescue a project we call these rescue projects.

What tends to happen is when down the road into an evaluation of a solution or a set of solutions, companies may tend to implement those solutions and have never taken the time to really look at their current business processes, what works, what doesn’t, and the people that are driving those. All of a sudden, they realize they need to do that and what they find is they’re invested in the software. They’re invested in a lot of time and effort up to that point.

They’re pulling up stakes and saying, “Hold up, we’ve got to look at this now.” What we find is for those companies, you’re going to do it now or you’re going to do it later. But if you do it upfront, it’s going to save you so much time and money. In fact, just our estimates as we look back over our careers here at Syte Consulting, I would say it probably takes something along the lines of two to three months maybe to do the full on business assessment with a company and our clients versus if you have to pull up stakes and are down the down the path a little further, you’re looking at closer to four or five months.

The bigger issue is just the disruption to the momentum. I think that you found in the evaluation implementation phase that that’s really, really hard on a company and on a team that’s maybe midstream. So, again, business assessment is key. We want to assess our our core business processes and the people that drive those early. It’s a second step in our process to business transformation and we want to make sure we’re doing that early and ahead of the head of the evaluation implementation so that we just are setting you up for success right out of the gates and making sure and taking great care of your people along the way.

So join me next time. We’re going to talk about solution evaluation and why it matters, why we do it, how we do it, maybe even how long it takes and how much it costs. There’s good data out there and we’ve done enough of this now to be able to say this is kind of what it is. I would love to share that with you next time, so I hope you’ll join me. In the meantime, if you have questions about business transformation or any part of the journey, we’d certainly love to meet you where you’re at and have a bigger conversation.

I”m happy to help you in this journey. Thank you and have a great day!