Don’t let the cute video disarm you!
3. Stakeholder Buy-in
Let me start by saying, “Involve representatives of all affected departments in EVERY phase! Involve them early, and involve them often!”.
Why do I say this? I have attended far too many project kick-off meetings, where the people who are actually affected, have no clue as to the contractual agreement that resulted from the vendor’s interactions with the company, and thus eventually require additional contracts to address the gaps that will occur during the discovery phase or later implementation phases of a project.
Additionally, you may wish to consider acquiring an outside consultancy to help, that has specific subject matter expertise on the type of system you are replatforming. An outside resource automatically forces two things to happen.
- All stakeholders will have to provide the requested input, in a timely manner, due to the organization indicating that this ‘is’ a priority, since they ‘are’ paying for an outside consultant. This is especially helpful in those cases where it is difficult to obtain stakeholder participation due to conflicting priorities.
- A more comprehensive understanding of the possible impact of the replatforming effort.
Once you have your stakeholder buy-in, this leads us to the penultimate consideration, how does this affect HR capitol.