We’ve written many series on best practice tech identification, tech selection, and tech implementation in the hopes of inverting the odds from an 80%+ chance of failure to an 80%+ chance of success, but given that failures are literally still happening on a daily basis, it seems that most people can’t be bothered to read best practice advice so today we’re going to flip the script and tell you all the reasons you’re going to fail and then you hope you go back and read the best practice advice we’ve freely given you (in series such as Successful Vendor Selection – The Series).
5. You Don’t Understand How To Select Proper Systems
As per our previous instalment, the answer is never to select the systems recommended by your favourite Big X consultancy whose recommendations are always in the mutual back-scratching club. With all the finders fees and recommendation fees built into the relationships, you’re paying multiples of what you should be for the tech even if the tech is appropriate. Typically the tech in the big vendors isn’t the best or most modern tech, and often the tech you fall back on only if you’re such a large enterprise that smaller vendors can’t serve you.
It’s not vendor size, Big X recommendation, marketing, or hype. And it’s never (Gen-) AI unless there’s no other solution. AI accelerates what you give it. And when you give it bad process, bad data, and bad instructions, you get an even worse result than what you have now. Until you’re best in class with last generation tech, you’re not even ready to consider AI.
The answer, as we’ve said before, is to find an independent consultant or consultant from a niche consultancy with no vendor relationships and no implementation team. The consultant/consultancies only line of business must be advisory, solution advisory, and project assurance — not implementation and integration and definitely not vendor partnerships. While the consultancies with the partnerships will tout the benefits and how they get (their customers) top tier support, first response, and the newest releases; that’s hype, not results. Results come from the systems that are right for you, not the systems right for the Big X consultancy.
Unless, of course, you are skilled enough to implement the best practice selection process yourself.
6. You Don’t Understand How Long It Will Take To Implement New Systems
A technology system implementation, replacement, or upgrade is an organizational mega-project in a mid-sized or larger organization. Even though SaaS vendors can partition a new instance in minutes, that’s not implementation, integration into your systems, incorporation into your daily processes, or institutionalization into your team’s routine. That all takes time. Lots of time — and a lot more time than your vendors will tell you. They know that you’ll be drawn to the proposal with the shortest implementation time so they will lie about how long it will really take and base their proposal on the theoretical minimum if everyone worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and nothing ever, ever went wrong.
But we know the truth. Everything that can go wrong, will, to some degree. No one can dedicate as much time as the project plan says. All of the integrations will take longer than estimated. The data will be 10 times worse and 10 times as incomplete as was assumed, so there will be delays to clean the data and integrate external sources to buff it up. So things will drag out well beyond the proposal. Typically multiples.
That’s because no one will admit it’s a mega-project, and that’s why the technology project failure rate keeps increasing year-over-year despite being at an all time high of 88%+ in general, and 94% if Gen-AI. The reality is that mega-project success rates are 0.5%, as chronicled by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner in How Big Things Get Done, where a study of over 16,000 projects across 136 countries going back to 1910 revealed the success rate. This is where technology project success rates are headed until everyone wakes up to the reality that they are dealing with mega projects and all AI does is speed up the failure.
7. You Don’t Understand How To Do Change Management
It’s not just implement the software, integrate the data feeds, flip the switch, and go. That’s a surefire guarantee for system avoidance and bypass.
Change management involves understanding how the processes are changing, what training the users will need, how best to go about it, how fast the switchover can actually happen, planning for, and managing all the non-technology details and implementing proper project assurance to make sure it actually happens. That last part is key — project assurance that starts before the first step of system implementation and continues until the adoption and usage hits the required targets — which will typically be months, if not years, after initial system implementation depending on the system. A few months for a dedicated solution or small suite, to a few years for an organization wide ERP or SCP for a large multi-national organization in dozens of countries.
8. You Don’t Know How To Recognize and Correct Issues To Avoid System Bypass
Just like no implementation will go according to plan (which is why over-optimistic schedules will never happen), no design will be as perfect as believed. Something critical will always be missed and multiple significant issues will crop up over time. The ability to recognize these issues quickly and do something about them before your employees start bypassing the system — because once they start, they won’t stop — the harder it will be to get them back on the system.
Let’s say you buy a new e-Procurement system designed to curb P-Card tail spend and allow the vast majority of spend to follow procedure, be tracked against budgets, and properly managed over time. Sounds great in theory, but lets say that any purchase not in the catalog requires an RFQ with at least 3 vendors, or a 3-way price comparison between 3 online vendors with a manager’s sign-off, which adds time and hassle for purchases that used to be one and done because the amounts were under thresholds, all of the options were always within a few % of each other, and saving $2 on a $100 purchase is NOT worth 15 minutes of an employee’s time who’s fully burdened cost is $100 an hour.
If you don’t pick up on this quickly, and let them one-and-done purchases under the old P-card amount through easy-peasy punch-out, they’ll go back to P-carding everything and if you take the P-card away, they’ll go back to the personal credit card and monthly expense report. You need to quickly figure out who is bypassing, why, and how you make the system easier to use than bypass.