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| Implement
your Plan; Be Flexible and Persevere |
Involve and train your staff throughout the process
Inevitably, the successful implementation of an eBusiness
project will depend on the commitment of the employees. Staff
should be involved in a variety of ways during implementation
and Chapter 6 addresses
this issue in full.
Work hard at communicating
One of the specific reasons Dubarry, the footwear manufacturer
cited for selecting a consultant was: “It was evident
from an early stage that we’d met with someone who understood
us”. If you read through the case
studies, a similar theme keeps recurring. A consultant’s
willingness to listen and their ability to understand the
client’s needs was often a key factor in selection decisions.
While the case studies have been toned down somewhat to avoid
giving offence, some companies were highly critical off the
record of IT consultants who “just did not listen to
us”.
In any significant project, good communications is vital. You want
to avoid ending up hearing statements such as “Oh, I thought
Johnny was doing that” or “I know you must have put a lot
of work into this, but it isn’t actually what we wanted”.
You must work at ensuring everybody is clear on exactly what they
have to do.
In an IT project, matters are complicated by the variety of different
groups involved in the project. These include management users IT
staff and internal and external consultants. Each of these groups
tends to speak their own “language” and to look at things
in their own way. They can take certain things for granted without
considering that these may not be obvious to people from the other
groups.
In an eBusiness project you may also have to contend not only with
your own users, management and IT people but also with those in your
customers’ and suppliers’ companies.
It may, for example, be blindingly obvious to you that staff will
often have to deviate from the standard operating procedures when
handling urgent orders. However, this may not be at all obvious to
the IT people, and if you don’t spell it out clearly, you may
end up with a system that cannot cope with urgent orders. A good IT
consultant will be aware that users do not always spell things out
and will ask probing questions. However, as a user you should not
rely on this. Not all IT people are good at communicating and even
the best can have an off day.
Equally, you need to work at ensuring you fully understand what the
IT people are proposing and in particular that you fully understand
the implications of their suggestions.
Also
available on this CD
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