Dr Susan Foster discusses how a focus on human factors when implementing an enterprise system, with the help of a Training Management Lifecycle model, can deliver post-project business success.
The term ‘silver bullet’ derives from a combination of folklore and fairy-tale. The bullet cast from silver is the only weapon that is effective against a werewolf or witch; in one folk song, a Bulgarian rebel leader invulnerable to normal weapons was felled by a silver bullet; the ‘Lone Ranger’ used silver bullets as calling cards to represent symbols of justice, law and order. The idiom ‘silver bullet’ has now become a general metaphor for a straightforward solution that is shown to be extremely effective against a major prevailing problem.
This article focuses on two issues: the recognition that an effective preventative measure – training is shown to be the ‘silver bullet’ against a major prevailing problem; the failure by organisations when implementing an enterprise system to achieve business benefits.
When implementing an enterprise system, organisations often experience failure to meet implementation deadlines and budgets, causing substantial financial losses and leaving them unable to achieve business benefits. However, failure to build a business case prior to an implementation has been partly responsible for many companies not fully knowing the extent of their return on investment. Deloitte reported that implementing companies could expect a dip in benefit realisation after go-live, with the length and depth of the dip dependent on how well the implementation had been managed. Deloitte identified the top barriers to benefit realisation and major challenges to ERP implementations as being people-related issues, with the main issue being the management of change, including training and communication.
Interestingly, although many companies go through a number of enterprise system implementations, change management issues still prevail leaving a significant impact on the potential success and benefit realisation of the company. Change management places human performance at the core of business success. Therefore change management practices that target a positive culture shift and individual skill and knowledge transfer engender individual readiness for change, and promote a successful project and business outcome.
The model of training success and business value provides a formal continuous process to evaluate business success and value and is based on management consultant Peter Drucker’s approach: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Value is created when the implementation is successful; that is, if it is on time and on budget, and all staff are trained, while training success is assessed against user attendance, staff understanding of the trained content, user satisfaction and user acceptance of the system. User satisfaction is the extent to which users believe the information system meets their information requirements; if they understand how to use the system, they are more likely to accept the system, thus reducing resistance. This has a flow-on effect to operational and business success, where operational success is expressed in terms of users using the system successfully; leading to system productivity improvements, process efficiency and effectiveness, and error reduction. Business success is measured against return on investment, economic value-add, revenue increases and productivity cost savings with intangible benefits accruing such as increased customer satisfaction.
To achieve operational and business success, I turn attention to the importance of training users. So often I hear staff saying: “The trainer did not pitch the training to my level”, “Why are we changing?”, “The old system worked!”, “I don’t understand the new business processes!”, or simply “I don’t have the skills for the change”. Bersin & Associates identified the biggest training issue was not in developing new content, but rather building the organisational learning culture and understanding the new skills and disciplines needed to be effective. Bersin argues that the need for ‘formal’ training is greater than ever; ensuring staff get the right information presented in the right way.
The importance of training as an intervention rests in its ability to bring about skill and knowledge transfer, thus supporting business transformation. Hence, when designing training interventions, consideration to factors that enable skill transfer are important.
These include:
- The trainers’ skill in knowledge transfer,
- Individual characteristics,
- Work environment,
- Training materials, and
- Training design.
An all-important interactive technique to identify what needs changing is to adopt Design Thinking. Design Thinking is an approach to observe actions, identify what needs to change and establish an interactive process to involve users in the change process. This approach answers such questions:
- “Why is the change needed?”,
- “What needs changing?”,
- “How will the change be achieved?”, and
- “How will the change be assessed?”.
Involving users in the change process is an important component to effective change.
Once the why and what of change has been identified,the next step is to identify the how of change. Establishing an effective training strategy is important to ensuring training is effectively managed. A comprehensive training strategy developed by Foster Consulting and designed from key learnings is the Training Management Lifecycle (TML). The importance of such a strategy is that it can be adapted to anytraining requirements, such as system implementation, upgrade or for updating training needs and covers all aspects of training. The TML visually depicts an ongoing cycle of training activities and provides the opportunity for the training to be assessed and managed pre- and post-implementation. The Lifecycle includes nine iterative phases.
The TML also includes training governance and training ownership. Training governance is important to establish training guidelines such as principles and policies which are used to manage the way the training is designed and conducted; while training ownership ensures a level of responsibility is placed on trainers for the training. This is especially important where a ‘train-the-trainer’ approach is adopted.
In essence, change management practices are based on a range of core concepts:
- Human performance is placed at the centre of business performance.
- Communication is identified as a core construct in the change initiative.
- Effective training practices are imperative to ensure staff effectively move through the change.
- Effectively managing these concepts ensures the change process can optimise an organisation’s revenue and profit delivery after the change has taken place.
It should be noted that how effective the change management strategy will influence users to accept or reject the change efforts.
Clearly, for companies to achieve benefit realisation, they must ensure an effective change management approach where its core focus is firmly placed on training.
Dr Susan Foster holds a PhD covering enterprise system implementations, as well as higher degree qualifications in enterprise systems, information technology, education, and psychology. Dr Foster has been heavily involved in developing SAP related curriculum and consulting for the last 10 years and has a number of SAP solution consultant certificates. She is engaged in working with the SAP User Group and is currently the SAP SIG lead for the Organisational Change and Training group. Email: sue.foster@monash.edu.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Autumn 2014.
