Software is an organizational change project

No business can survive without computerization today. Yet the success rate for software projects is highly variable. Some businesses are successful at gaining a return on investment. Many are not.

Why is the success rate variable? In many cases, the same software product is installed in similar businesses, why is one successful and another is not.

The reason is the same as the reason that organizational change projects have a high failure rate. When you change the software that runs your business, you are creating an organizational change and you have to manage it in a similar manner. It is not just a technology change and the reason for failure is not often technology or lack of technical skills.

What makes it an organizational change?

1) Your business operation is made up of business processes (quote, order entry, accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, etc.).

2) What is business software? It is the automation of a business process (the process has been programmed to operate in a certain way). There are certain expectations in these processes, and many options available for tailoring the software to your business.

3) In order to implement the software successfully, you must understand your existing business processes in detail and choose the functionality of the software that best fits your needs. Many failures are due to the lack of understanding of this impact.

4) It is unlikely that there is a perfect match between what you are doing today and what the software allows you to do. At very least the software is automating functions that you were doing manually before. This means that people's jobs will be changing. Sometimes this requires organizational changes. If people don't understand the reasons for this change, they will resist it. The resistance will be directly proportional to the amount of flexibility that people have in their current jobs. Many software projects fail for this reason!

5) The software company is experienced in their software and provides training on its features and functions. However, it seldom relates exactly to how you do business. You receive fire hose training on the functions, but not on the changes in the business process. They search around for the features that will let them do what they used to do before. Sometimes they can no longer do what they did before in the way they used to do it. Although projects seldom fail for this reason, productivity goes down for a long time while people learn how to do the job using the new software.

When you make all of these changes, you change your business processes, you change people's jobs and sometimes you even end up changing the organization. If people don't understand why all of this is necessary, you will encounter problems.

Check in to see what the solution is.