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[Melissa Pershing]

Did your shift alignment of your organizational resources to support a new ERP implementation (or a major upgrade)?.  If so, did you change again to a new, steady state operational organization and disband the project team after deployment?  I’m curious specifically about technical/IT resources, but would welcome feedback on how the program affected the entire organization. 

Today we are roughly organized based on a traditional model: infra, end user services, governance/security, PMO/projects, and then delivery services which breaks down into custom development, data/BI, ERP legacy, and finally a team that supports mainly off the shelf/SaaS solutions.  I don’t think this model is optimal long-term.  Its inefficient and doesn’t lend itself to setting us up to implement DevOps or a similar agile delivery framework.

I’ve seen some reference materials on suggestions for navigating this topic for Gartner, but don’t have access to read.  Stories from the trenches are much more meaningful anyhow.  Thanks in advance!

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Melissa Pershing
Libbey, Inc.
Toledo OH
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[Archive User]

Hi Melissa,
You pose a very important question, and something that many organizations do not understand until after they have implemented AX.  I was in IT management for a very large AX implementation where we had hired employees both in IT as well as some business areas.  After implementation the business employees went back to their original jobs, and the IT staff remained the same; however, the consultants went on to the next gig.  During the project there were certain additional approvals and procedures; after go-live, the policies and procedures within IT changed back to steady state with some improvements.

I still believe that an organization leveraging ITIL and PMO can be very good even if they are siloed.  COBIT also provides a framework for grading your IT processes and providing a target to get to the next level.  If you are interested in a new form of IT organization, there is an organization in Houston which is trying to implement a form of holacracy called XOIT.  You might be interested in reading some of their approaches.
— http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/
— https://friedkingroupcio.com/2016/01/04/exponential-it-xoit/

Dag III
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dagcalafell3

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Dag Calafell
mcaConnect
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[Tom Noorkah]

We see an ongoing internal need for:

Business Analysis – you are really never done “implementing” so there are continual needs to enhance and expand your usage. After all it is a ERP system and you probably didn’t implement 100% of its capabilities on day 1 and there are always efficiencies to be gained. 

Training, Support & documentation – Your users change responsibility, retire, or leave. New folks are added. Your processes change and need updated. All this needs regular care and feeding.

QA – testing each release and update is wearing us out.   Our experience has been that testing only what is in release notes is recipe for disaster and really end up needing to do nearly full regression testing for peace of mind.  We don’t have an automated testing system and the project team functional leads are balancing their everyday responsibilities with also having to test bug fixes, updates, and new features with limited documentation available from partner and MSFT.

Reporting/BI – We resisted the urge to add a bunch of custom reports at implementation and have gone through a year using as much as can out of box. It is becoming more evident where gaps lie and should focus efforts.

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Tom Noorkah
FMS Admin
City of Columbus
Columbus OH
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[Melissa Pershing]

I appreciate the quick feedback and insights.  We don’t have a QA discipline yet.

Are the resources centered around an ERP team that contains a mix developers, QA, admins, BI, etc?  Right now all of our resources are managed on specific and separate teams.  Sort of like their own COE. 

We have discussed options such as separating out a 2 year project team with a dotted line to the program manager of the ERP implementation, yet they would maintain their direct supervisory alignment to lessen the administrative burden to the Program Manager.  We would then rethink the model when the new operational state is settled.  But that’s just one of a few options we are exploring. 

Great suggestion on the round-table topic.  We’re new to AXUG, so I will investigate!

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Melissa Pershing
Libbey, Inc.
Toledo OH
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[Rav Lal]

Interesting discussion and possibly one for a round-table at your next Chapter Meeting event. I have seen organisations work in many different ways, where possible its good practice to retain ERP expertise in-house in additional to Support, Infrastructure & Security, BI & reporting team, Master Data Management Team (this is commonly a virtual team of SMEs that have been involved in validation and user acceptance – and data owners are identified to ensure data quality is continually monitored) and retaining ERP expertise in the Business Applications/Project team is often good. Good procedures, training documents, user guides should always be maintained well for good adoption and boarding of new staff. Hope that helps if you would like to discuss further don’t hesitate to reach out. ravlal@live.com

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Rav Lal
ERP Programme Director
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[Sean Blais]

Where were y’all four years ago? Me and Jody could tell you horror stories that would make you cringe. I was a production supervisor of 23 people. One day the GM walks in and tells me to go figure out this AX thing…

Happy Friday!

Sean

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Sean Blais
Operations Support
Sutphen Corporation
Dublin OH
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[Elizabeth Johnson]

We went live a little over 2 years ago and we have actually had to increase our IT headcount.  We have a large Development, QA and IT Business Analysis team, as well as Infrastructure and Support Services.  We thought we would remain steady after deployment, but the need for Support from IT grew.  I’ve talked to other companies that put most of their resources into Training.  We did some of that as well, but that group didn’t grow like the IT Dept did.  I also do not see the IT Dept reducing it’s size any time soon, if ever.  Our company relies on IT to fix issues inside and outside of AX at all times/days and they wouldn’t be satisfied with the service of any outside providers that don’t have the sense of urgency of an internal IT dept.  Not sure if that answered your question, but I do feel like we are “still” inside the trenches after 2 years, and according to Microsoft we had one of the smoothest cutovers they have seen.

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Elizabeth Johnson
Director, IT
Performance Contracting Group, Inc.
Lenexa KS
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