- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception - Groucho Marx
"Sod the user" strategy save millions
MANAGERS rolling out an ERP project at Arizona State University have worked out that the only way to do it is to say "sod the user".
Since ERP rollouts are expensive and cause disruption, the planners decided that it was better that they caused problems rather than cost lots of cash.
The result is that they have a system that is up and running fairly cheaply but causes organisational disruptions.
According to ZDNet, the school made an explicit, strategic decision that user problems and organisational disruptions are an acceptable trade-off in the fight against high implementation costs.
Then you fix the problems as they arise.
This has meant that employees get the wrong salaries and armed guards have to protect the HR office, but other than that there have been only minor mistakes.
What they did was stick to rigid deadlines and not test the software too much as it was installed.
The final price tag for Arizona State’s project was $15 million to deploy the software and another $15 million to support it over the next five years. However if they had done it the old way it would have set them back $70 million.
The techies acknowledge everything has been painful and moral was incredibly low as a result.
More here µ<P>
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I know from personal experience a large company that tried the strongarm approach back in 1997.

They had recruited a new IT boss right from uni who had learned that Windows NT was the future. He decided to dump a perfectly functional UNIX-based business management system and install Windows PCs instead, more or less overnight.

There were legions of technicians running through the corridors for six months while nothing worked, orders could not be placed, computers crashed and general havoc ruled. A couple of hundred staff members were screaming their throats sore, but I didn't suffer very much because I was just producing drawings off the network.

After that period, it was found that the company had lost most of their (frustrated) customers and about £8M worth of revenue, so the entire department was dissolved and seld off in pieces. I went on to better places.

/M
To say that "armed guards have to protect the HR office" is quite a long stretch. Have you ever heard the term “better safe than sorry”?

HR did have a police officer in the lobby for a day or two when the first paychecks from the new system were issued. They had been advertising for months that switching from semi-monthly to bi-weekly pay periods would result in smaller checks since annual salaries would be paid over 26 checks instead of 24. However, as a precaution against the extremely miniscule chance that someone would not come to that realization and would be violently upset, they decided to have a small police presence at that time. I guess the remote possibility of having a Virginia Tech incident didn’t appeal to them. I just wish news outlets wouldn’t over-sensationalize it.

It’s also unfortunate that some people consider the entire project a failure just because we’ve had issues with payroll. Certainly, that part of the project has not gone as planned, but the student side of the implementation has gone rather well. I would estimate that at least 80% of this implementation was a raging success. Certainly, that’s much better than one would expect from our aggressive timeline and a “sod the users” mentality. ;-)

BTW, I think the word you’re looking for in the final sentence is “morale”, not “moral”.
It seems that last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal article about ASU’s ERP implementation has stirred considerable discussion in various venues around the country. Much is being extrapolated from some fairly vague details in the article. While we appreciate the Journal’s take on our progress, short articles like this have limited space for specifics. And focusing on controversy, while providing a provocative read, doesn’t create the best backdrop for discussing the broader issues. (Read more at https://uto.asu.edu/blog/2007/09/28/wsj/)