Lesson 3: User is not Joker

VIP! Who is the actual VIP in all the flurry and chaos we meet everyday .

Customer is the queen and the boss is the king. But son, never forget the real guy amidst all this shuffle of luck. Something many IT initiatives err to do. They zone out the person who matters a lot, if not the most - the user.

My not-so-boring CIO friends always bore this in mind that constant communication and users involvement will ensure that end results are delivered by IT. Sometimes Project management, lack of reviews and skills becomes limitations.

This CIO who is also an executive VP, had on one occasion, extended the debate with me to length. He had hastened to underline that IT projects generally creates lot of hype and hence there is always a sense of increase in the expectation levels from all the users. IT brings transparency, sometimes takes away the controls from the power centre and hence it is all about change management and tackling softer issues. Hence involvement from the top management is utmost essential for most of the big IT projects.

Continuous reviews and involvement from all the strata of users from operating levels to the top level is essential to keep track of outcomes, change management, softer issues and also tab on time and cost. Generally IT projects when estimated by the consultants tend to be ambitiously targeted and then time as well as cost increases as compared to budgets. Service levels if not monitored tends to get compromised and users dis-satisfaction can start coming due to several such reasons. But proper project management, sponsorship, involvement and continuous reviews are the key critical success factors for most other IT project to deliver the expected results.

I talked about this with Manu Govind, Manager -Information Systems at Synthite too and he almost shook me out of my slumber when he asked how much we focus on tight Budgets to implement an IT piece or how right approvals tend to be the issue to chase. All it needs is a good process-oriented approach and a tight deadline. But the one thing that is defenestrated often is the critical part of ‘user requirements'. 

Govind made me realize that indeed we tend to ice-skate over the user-requirement-gathering stage. We hurry up and rush for implementations, putting all pressure on vendors, when the blueprint itself is incomplete. He suggested that it won't hurt if companies spent 50 per cent of their time in proper requirement gathering. Otherwise all implementation effort and time can turn out to be a waste.

Strangely, or not so strangely, my good, sharp and magically-simple-in-his approach analyst friend Sunil Padmanabh , Research Director, Gartner had always insisted on me towing this unbeaten but obviously-simple path.

CIOs tend to overshadow and underestimate user expectations so much, he would sigh. Seventy per cent of IT projects fail not because of vendor selection but because of user expectation tracking. It does not pay to get too narrow or isolated with IT. Key considerations of an enterprise are ignored, he remarked and the glaring gap of an end-user not being sensitised for the deployment is quite a lot, he added.

Son, I never knew till then that as many as sixty to seventy per cent of large enterprises in India had built-in redundancies of up to thirty per cent in their ERPs. All this when a typical ERP user organisation pays about 22 per cent maintenance for every user.

The analyst friends I had the honour of chatting with during all my travels etched many things on my radar. And son, failure to support the deployment with proper training is not to be sidelined. Even the most "intuitive" solutions have features/functions that won't be used to their fullest without adequate training in them

Also, inadequate internal change management should be watched out for. The customer doesn't spend enough time working with internal constituents to keep them apprised of key milestones, cut-over dates, etc., and make sure they're ready to adopt the new solution once it's deployed. Shrikant Kulkarni, Senior VP & CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd used to tell me that each phase in ERP implementation project is very crucial. These include requirements study, process/system blue print, process gaps identification, user sign off for the blue print document/user interface test data/functional -system testing/ data migration/ pilot run etc; so and so forth. Any slip/deviation in these phases can lead to disasters at a later stage of going live.

He often wondered that it is seen that enough time is not provided for preparing the training contents and training plan before the ERP roll out. In the absence of adequate training, users face challenges in navigating through the functionalities thus wasting their time in trial and error. This becomes a main cause of user dissatisfaction. On many instances, Kulkarni iterated, user inputs on business processes are not taken, or not taken seriously. Also I have seen IT managers commenting that users do not understand what they want from the system. Such attitude/approach results into a IT solution, ERP deployment that has little buying from the user community.

As my smart son would have figured out by now, this person called ‘user' can be a real trump card. It's not about what cards you hold, it's how you play them rightly, remember?