Implementing EPM in an Organization

THE CULTURAL SHIFT TO EPM - THE PATH OF CHANGE

Resistance to change is natural in most companies. New ways of doing business are not successful if those new methods are simply levied upon people in the organization. Lasting change is brought about over a gradual process that starts with fostering understanding and ends with people in the organization taking ownership in the success of the change. To provide a clear framework for managing cultural change, we have identified four stages of successful change: understanding, acceptance, participation, and ownership.

The first step in creating change in an organization is to foster understanding of the reasons for change and the expected outcomes. In the case of EPM, understanding is created through targeted communication sessions with stakeholders at all levels of the organization. Communications should focus on getting people familiar with the terminology of EPM, providing a generic EPM vision and framework, and providing general benefits of EPM. The terminology, vision, framework, and benefits should be communicated in a general sense, so that people can get accustomed to the concepts before having to analyze the specific impacts to their organization.

Once understanding is achieved, the next step is to foster acceptance at all levels of stakeholders. Creating acceptance involves shifting from general EPM concepts to terminology, vision, framework, and benefits that are specific to the organization. While communication in the “Understanding” stage might be phrased as “an organization achieves these benefits,” communication in the “Acceptance” stage is phrased as “your organization will achieve these benefits.”

The next stage in the cultural shift is participation. Stakeholders will take ownership of the solution if they have thorough participation in the design and implementation of their organization's EPM solution. It becomes imperative to promote stakeholder participation when working with external consultants. When external consultants are used, stakeholders sometimes see the work as being taken care of and therefore they focus on their familiar responsibilities. The result is, the external consultant has done most of the work, which provides ample opportunity for the organization to dismiss the solution. Since the goal is to establish ownership of the solution among stakeholders.

The final stage of the cultural shift is ownership. When stakeholders own the solution, they will sustain the solution and promote its further use and improvement. This ownership is important in the early stages of implementing EPM, because it is stakeholder ownership that carries momentum forward. The cultural shift in implementing EPM is an iterative process.

Managing the cultural shift is important to sustaining an EPM implementation, because common challenges can arise around shifts in power and more open sharing of knowledge. It is very typical for the perceptions of an organization's success to change as more accurate and openly shared information becomes available. People can hold great fear of being exposed by unflattering information. In terms of a cultural shift, an organization must emphasize the opportunities for improvement rather than the evidence of failure as it moves to an EPM culture.

DESIGN FEATURES OF A SUCCESSFUL EPM SOLUTION

Successful EPM implementations are driven from stakeholders participating in the design. Stakeholder participation is one piece of a successful design. People can sometimes be tempted to attempt more complex processes and tools than the organization is ready for. This commonly results in failure. A more effective approach is to focus on fundamental capabilities that can provide immediate benefits, while allowing the EPM process to mature. For example, expecting to implement a full set of earned value measures is unreasonable if the organization is currently challenged with task-level estimating and data collection. In this example, it would make more sense to emphasize building and managing schedules with reliable data before worrying about more advanced measures.

A successful EPM solution design will have fundamental capabilities in:

• Enterprise-wide project definition, prioritization, and authorization.
• Resource capacity planning and allocation.
• Detailed project definition, planning, and scheduling.
• Enterprise-wide and project-specific communication, visibility, and reporting.