With Project One’s help and direction, the decision was made early on to progress with a ‘greenfield’ implementation – a new ‘out of the box’ implementation of S/4HANA, utilising standard processes. This was critical to future success and led to a further challenge of needing significant business change activity, to transform the business areas to follow these new standard processes. Enforcing the above direction required the right level of governance and very strong and capable programme sponsorship, which the Project One team put in place.
This then filtered down into very strong and capable business process leads, who could make sure that the new processes could be adhered too with minimal changes required to the core SAP product. The other key challenge was timescale. By far the cleanest and lowest risk implementation approach was to cutover at year-end.
The plan had to be examined and re-worked several times to fit to an end-to-end two-year window to show an implementation date of Jan ’22. This required deep programme management and supplier management skills and expertise.
Project One partnership
Project One provided the programme leadership for the two-year programme. This was split into two key phases of mobilisation and then delivery. Investing up-front to mobilise thoroughly enabled the delivery phase to launch on a very sound footing and ensured the required ‘right first time’ approach, which ultimately saved the company both time and money.
The mobilisation phase ran for a year, initially working with the incumbent IT supplier to map out the high-level processes and systems integration points and to form this into requirements for a Request for Information (RFI) and then Request for Proposal (RFP) phase to select a systems integrator (SI). Due to the compressed timescales, an innovative approach was followed for the RFP, using a draft set of requirements initially and then a fuller set, once available, to feed into the contracting process for the chosen SI partner.
Mobilisation also drove the selection of the customer side business team – 12 business process leads in total, all of whom had to be backfilled to ensure they could be deployed full time onto the programme. This phase also confirmed the delivery phase plan and budget, signed-off the business case and set-up the governance required.
Programme delivery
Once into delivery, there were four key factors that Project One provided to enable the programme team, of 120 people at peak, to be successful:
- Relentless Drive: the supplier organisations and the internal teams needed to be managed and driven to very tight timescales. The 12-month delivery window was non-negotiable due to the year-end deadline, so hitting key milestones and keeping the programme under control was critical.
- One-team ethos: making sure that the organisational badges were ‘left at the door’ was critical to the culture and mind-set of the delivery team. Making sure that everyone was driving to the same agreed outcomes, and that any commercial issues were dealt with separately.
- No customisation: utilising the out of the box S/4HANA processes and functionality drove best practice into the solution and enabled a more straightforward implementation. Also using the selected SI’s proven delivery method ensured a streamlined delivery.
- Quick decisions: the straightforward governance and the strong sponsorship enabled decisions to flow up the chain when required with the right data in place to make the right calls. Any delays were escalated immediately to ensure the appropriate focus.
