- Posted by jbehrendt on July 17, 2009
The last two weeks we had to deal with some resistance to our project coming from an unexpected corner. The managers being responsible for the post-closing and migration, in which all systems and processes would need to be adopted to the new structure, raised concerns if the organization would be able to manage such a huge transition in the required short time period. These concerns were big enough to trigger another board meeting, in which again the question if the project should be continued or not had to be discussed. For sure, this development shows that our confidentiality policy, according to which only a very selected group of people got access to relevant project information, only after signing a specific confidentialy agreement, worked nicely. Obviously, some of the people that would be responsible for the migration process did not even hear about the project before.
The concerns had, of course, to be taken seriously, since scenarios like a complete breakdown of the supplier invoicing processes (for around 100,000 suppliers!), or huge VAT payments due to wrongly addressed invoices, were already under discussion. We organized a one-day workshop, for which we could get together around 30 relevant managers that would have to deal with the migration process. The problem did not become easier by the fact that, at the same time, two other conceptual changes are taking place at customer side, which means the migration would have to consider the effects of three significant conceptual changes simultaneously in all systems and processes.
After hours of detailed technical discussions, and after digesting a lot of complaints by these people always being at the last part of the information and decision chain, a solution could be found. In the board meeting scheduled two days later, we would present a draft project structure with around 12 (!) sub-projects for an integrated post-closing and migration project for all three relevant conceptual changes. One of them, labelled "organization and communication", would start immediately in order to meet the ambitious deadlines for switching all business partners from their old legal counterparts to the new, integrated one. At the same time, confidentiality requirements would be loosened so that - except of some sensitive parts - information could be distributed to all relevant parties being involved in the processes. Fortunately, afterwards most participants commented the results with "it wll be hard, but in the long term beneficial, and we can manage it" - a nice colletion of statements I immediately converted into testimonials for the board presentation.
In the end, the board meeting went well, and the board again confirmed that they would like to continue with the project. But this was probably mainly due to a lot of lobbying before the event, in which all people that could help convinced their respective responsible board members that business and regular processes would not break down, and that the organization could not only manage the change but supports it as well. So the project goes on, the only remaining items still being the pending statement of the tax authorities, some employee-related issues, and of course the final voting behaviour of the shareholders.