ERP Project Roles and Decision Makers (Who Does What?)

In this video, we're going to talk about who's involved in an E R P implementation. In a previous video, we talked about the different roles involved in an e p implementation, but today I want to talk specifically about who gets to make the decisions and at what levels are they made, like we talked about earlier, you've got the sponsor, you have a project manager, you have functional leads, and you have an overall project manager either on your side as an internal city employee or a consultant. The project team on the vendor's side will have their own team. They'll have a project manager, they'll have functional leads. They'll, they'll have what's called implementation consultants in some cases, but who on your side makes the decisions and decisions come in many different flavors, right? You have the small decisions being who gets to process invoices, who gets to process purchase orders, what in what sequence does the requisition turn into a purchase order?

All those decisions are what I would call business process handoff related ones, but then there are major decisions. What kind of chart of accounts do you want? How do you modify a chart of accounts based on the state's guidelines? How do you modify a chart of accounts based on local ordinances or just personal preferences? What fits and who gets to make that decision? You also will see that during an implementation, there are policy decisions to be made. If you haven't done an implementation like this in a long time, you're probably operating on older business practices, older policies, older procedures that need to change based on the system. A good example is a client of ours has a fire department that was implementing a time and attendance system, and they couldn't quite agree on what a full day's work comprises of. Meaning their day was 24 hours and 10 minutes, and no system in the world was able to do that.

Defining Roles

So we had to walk them through a policy change decision, and at that time, the decision was made at the very highest level of the organization. The other less stringent and less dramatic decision points are, again, how do you practice internal controls? Who gets to make what decisions in an implementation? And it typically comes down to the chief financial officer. In a financial system implementation, if it's an H R I S implementation is typically the HR director, and those decisions are made at the very highest level. In many cases, business processes that rely on legacy systems are being done in different ways in the same department. So when it comes down to business process design and designing your two B flows, certain policy and standardization practice decisions have to be made. So in terms of decision making, you can define decisions in levels at the functional level where you're deciding who gets to approve certain things, who gets to have what security clearance.

Those decisions can be made at the manager level, at the functional leads level. Now, when it comes time to decide on what days or checks are going to run, how do you approve budgets, what kind of internal controls and approval steps you have baked into the system and the approval process, all those come down to the decision maker. Inevitably, there are tussles butting of heads. People don't know which direction to go. Two very competent management teams may come to you, Mr. Cfo, and say, we can't decide. This is what I think. This is what I think. In that case, we need someone on the team that is not afraid to make decisions that has veto power, and then they can put their hand on the table and say, this is how we're going to do this. I, I'm going to pick option A over option B, and whatever that might be.

Staying on Track

A system implementation of this size and E R P implementation can fail. If you don't have a strong decision making authority. If you don't have one person on the team that can put the hammer down and say, we're not going to do that, we're going to do this, and let's keep the project moving forward. If your e r P project is imminent, if you're looking for ways to make it more efficient, to have better controls and decision making power, we can help you define who those roles should be, what roles should have, what power, and who gets to make ultimate decisions. Please get in touch. Thank you.