iProCon Insight - Latest Thinking

Stakeholder Power as a barrier for SaaS adoption

iProCon Ltd. - Monday, July 04, 2011
Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming an important concept for large organisations appealing to CxOs and business users for a variety of reasons. Recent discussions have show that there are quite a few barriers slowing down the adoption of the idea and that it’s not necessarily the right thing for all organisations anyway.
We’ve identified one particular barrier, which seems to me to have the potential to slow down SaaS adoption considerably: there are powerful stakeholders, who are loosing out in the process. Many employees, decision makers, and most notably large IT service providers and system integrators have reason not to like SaaS, as it will threaten their jobs and revenues.

Cyber security is not purely a technology question

iProCon Ltd. - Thursday, June 16, 2011
A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly gave some interesting insights. "Meeting the cybersecurity challenge" shows that more sophisticated attackers are only one of several reasons for the increased threat. Other reasons are more based on how the nature of the business has evolved with employees expecting flexible access, suppliers and customers being more closely interlinked in supply chain processes, and companies forced to venture out from behind their firewalls to earn their money online.
Therefore, the solution of the problem cannot be expected to come from the IT specialists alone. There are business decisions to be made, e.g. classifying data to see, where the most critical information sits and focus the main efforts there.
We also observed that a paradigm shift is required in many organisations to change data security from being perceived as a purely technical problem to a business problem to be addressed on various levels. Many of the recent high profile security disasters were owed to behavioural rather than technical problems. Whilst security technology is to play a key role and needs to be driven forward, we believe awareness of information security needs to become part of the culture of an organisation - and with probably the majority of CxOs giving away passwords to their PAs or others, there is a long way to go...

Clientcase - Global Travel and Expense Rollout in 3 months

iProCon Ltd. - Monday, June 06, 2011
A high tech client aimed at making their T&E processes more efficient and get controls and analytics in place.
The project comprised a new travel policy, a new global travel agency, online travel booking and online expense reporting with approval workflows, rollout of credit cards to 50% of the workforce, an outsourced audit service, and tighter controls on providers of travel and accommodation.
The project was successfully delivered based on SaaS products within 3 months, followed by a period of optimisation in interfaces and analytics.
Read full T&E case study

New article: hands-on techniques to manage change in ERP projects

iProCon Ltd. - Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Whilst many generic change models apply to ERP implementations as well, change resulting from an ERP programme has some unique features. This article about ERP change management presents 3 straightforward techniques that can be used by any ERP project manager to manage change more successfully.

Demystifying change management for IT projects – Part I

iProCon Ltd. - Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Most project owners and managers by now have recognised good Change Management as a crucial success factor for any systems implementation project. People talk a lot about it. However, looking around, I can’t see very much done about it, let alone done successfully. Why is that so?

I found that one reason is most people are aiming to high, when thinking “Change Management” and then quietly abandon a task that’s beyond their capabilities and budget, but they can’t admit it. In other cases, “Change Management” is seen as a fluffy intangible exercise for the weak at heart that mustn’t be allowed to take resources away from designing processes or programming reports and web dynpros. These people give it about the same priority as exhibiting pieces of art in the project room.

In both cases, “Change Management” is only seen as the really big thing few people actually are able to get right: engaging the whole workforce, big communication programmes, changing people’s mindsets, changing values, cultural change. This is all very important and may be necessary for some projects. However, this is usually the wrong level to attack change management for the average IT project, because:

  • These issues need to be dealt with in a larger context considering the strategy and culture of the organisation as a whole
  • This is nothing to deal with as an afterthought during a systems implementation without extra resources
  • You need a dedicated expert in change and organisational culture to get it right. The average IT project manager will have a different focus in his or her skills set
  • With a lack of time, skills and context, we find many managers talking about the magical things around change management, but to no avail.
Therefore it is much more sensible and effective to focus on the basics. If you get these basic right, you’ll beat 80% of IT projects already and if you don’t all the magic of motivational speeches and messing around with culture won’t makeup for it. In this blog we want to present a few straightforward and common sense steps you can take to improve on the change management side of your project without being a business transformation guru.

One thing that always strikes me is that project managers often suggest they are managing change, but cannot tell me what exactly the change is they are allegedly managing. If you want to mitigate negative impact and exploit positive impact an IT project has on all parties affected, it would seem common sense to start with the question “What exactly is changing for these people?”.

Therefore the easiest and most natural step is: keeping track of process changes
It’s as simple as that: create a table somewhere to be accessed by your project team and make sure that, if anything is going to change in the way users will do their job in the future, it is tracked in this table. Here is one simple example showing how we track changes in our cherished project wiki (based on confluence):

Then use the information collected to

  • Get an overview of the process impact to see, whether it really makes sense
  • Communicate (and maybe get approval for, if not yet done) process changes
  • Show benefits counterbalancing any unpleasant changes people may have to get buy in
  • Train those affected by process changes, where necessary
  • Amend any documentation, including, but not limited to user handbook, auditing information, user helpdesk guidelines, etc.
  • Create any other preconditions require for these process changes to take effect with minimal distress for those affected
This is not a lot of extra work at all, but will safe you loads of effort.
Always remember: if you want to get buy in for change from an individual, you must be able to answer the simple question “What does this mean for me?”.

In reality, it may not be as straightforward as it seems for two reasons:
  • Getting the project team to keep track of all changes may require some change in attitude already. But here you are dealing with a limited group of people and a small change, and one you can easily demonstrate the benefits.
  • There’s still some management skill required to use the information in the way recommended above, but to have the list of changes is the crucial first step and the results will definitely be better than the results of managing an unknown or vaguely known change
If you don’t yet believe in the merits of such a simple process, think about your last project and about resistance and complaints (large scale and small) or rework you had. How much of this would have been avoidable, if you, your project team and all those affected by any changes had had a clear, shared understanding of all changes?

Engagement surveys: make sure, your workforce sees them as time well invested

iProCon Ltd. - Wednesday, April 14, 2010
When talking to HR managers, internal communication professionals, and other people responsible for engagements surveys or any kind on employee survey, we find that many of them have a similar problem: employees respond with an increasing amount of cynicism, mostly along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what we say in these surveys. They don’t change anything anyway.”

There are various reasons for employees feeling (often rightly so) that these surveys are a waste of their time and their organisations’ resources. Sometimes they are done for no other reason indeed, than to have a number to benchmark against, and to boast about. There’s no need to comment on this.

However, quite often an engagement survey is run based on the best of intentions, but its design or the levers actually available to pull do not allow any action that’s eventually reaching the workforce. There is also a common misconception that HR changing policies and pieces of paper qualifies as “action”.

Engagement surveys have the potential to help you improving business performance and to be perceived as a valuable exercise by your people. To get there, 3 basic elements must be observed:
  • Design the survey so that it clearly indicates the levers you have to pull, once you get the results. That’s far more important than having a single number for benchmarking purposes. We love to use surveys based on the Gallup Q12, but there are other ways to do it.
  • Make sure that you are actually able to pull these levers. In most cases this means you need to be able to change the way line managers manage the people directly reporting to them. If this doesn’t happen, you are unlikely to get beyond a paper exercise.
  • Act (there’s always some opportunity to improve. Being above industry benchmark doesn’t justify complacency) and make it very transparent to everybody what you are going to change, how this relates to survey results, what it is supposed to achieve, and what this means for the individual.
Sounds simple enough, but experience shows it’s not that easy. In most cases the initiative falls down because HR owns the survey and follow-up, but is not able to influence line managers to make any effective changes. If this is the case, you can save your money. Why would you invest in expensive diagnostics, if you know you won’t be able to treat the patient?

Simple tools to define and deliver your vision

iProCon Ltd. - Monday, June 08, 2009
Many senior management teams have a clear idea of what they want their organisation or project to achieve, but have difficulty in distilling the often complex plans into a clear message for all staff. In tandem with this challenge is the need to overcome organisational inertia to bring about change and deliver your desired vision.

This paper focuses on two simple tools that can be used to address the above challenges. The first, the identification of Critical Success Factors, is a relatively simple way of articulating what must be performed well in order to achieve your vision or strategic objectives. The second, the Force Field Analysis, is used to identify the forces that drive and restrain the achievement of an objective, making it easier to identify the next steps that will deliver maximum benefit.

Click here to read about simple tools to define and deliver your organisation or project's vision.

Executives are disillusioned with HR-Transformation

iProCon Ltd. - Wednesday, May 27, 2009
A recent economist.com article said: "...some (HR-)transformations eliminated up to 70% or more of the workload of the traditional HR generalist", but "The great expectations that HR transformation aroused, however, were largely frustrated. After a decade, fewer than 5% of executives said they thought that their organisation’s management of people was not in need of improvement."
So, in most cases HR-transformation managed to drive efficiencies, but utterly failed to achieve the expected improvement in HR's strategic contribution. This article certainly could not have surprised us less. Actually, it reads as if it had been written to explain, why iProCon HCM was established in 2008. Our mission is and always has been to improve the link between an organisation's management of Human Capital (including, but not restricted to, the HR function) and its business goals: Leveraging Human Capital to improve Business Performance. We started this consultancy because we have seen far too many examples, where this link was broken.
However, as indicated in the economist.com article, HR-transformation as it is usually pursued is not set up to achieve significant strategic results. In most cases it was an exercise to reduce HR admin effort and then it was hoped that the freed up resources would make HR a strategic partner - with more or less the same kind of people, skills, line management involvement, executive roles, etc. Most organisations recognised quickly that this wouldn't work and reduced HR-transformation to a mere cost-cutting exercise - quite often a successful one based on a rightsourcing strategy.

At iProCon HCM we have a different proposition for HR-transformation: we developed the HCCEM as a framework to set targets and drive the transformation of people management throughout the organisation with a very clear line of sight to business goals. Alignment with business strategy AND organisational culture are 2 out of 6 dimensions monitored across all areas of Human Capital. The HCCEM is basically an HR maturity model, inspired by the CMMI used in IT, but with an even stronger focus on business impact. It also comes with a best practise template to allow a quick start and initial assessment.

See an excerpt of the HCCEM framework (PDF), click here to learn more about the HCCEM and HR-transformation, or get in touch with us for a first discussion.

Accelerating transformation

iProCon Ltd. - Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Many organisations we talk to are struggling with similar issues. How can they ensure that the transformation is happening as quickly as possible? What can be done to make sure that those lower down the organisation have the same sense of urgency as those at the top? How can the transformation roadmap be defined so that the vital many have as clear an idea of the journey as those who defined it?

To address these challenges iProCon HCM has, over the past 12 months, developed and deployed the Human Capital Capability Excellence Model (HCCEM™).



The model and its underlying tools and processes deliver several significant benefits:
  • It helps the organisation understand what best practice actually looks like (in terms of managing change, people metrics and information systems, amongst other aspects related to human capital performance), encompassing both industry specific and cross-sector dimensions.
  • It benchmarks the current state of the organisation against best-practice. Benchmarking allows comparison across regions, business units or individual locations as appropriate.
  • Capabilities and Excellence are defined in terms of Levels. For example, Level 1 might be poor, whilst Level 5 is best practice. These definitions allow the organisation to define what level is desired and aim only as high as will deliver a positive return. If a business unit is at Level 5 in a capability where the organisation only requires Level 4, resources can be diverted to upskill other business units, or investment may be reduced.
  • The definition of levels (for example Levels 1 through 5) provides a road map for transformation. Managers responsible for business units sitting currently at Level 2 can clearly see what is required in order to reach Levels 3, 4 and 5. This helps them understand the transformation journey, but in steps that are driven by the agenda set by the top team.
  • Transformation progress reports become a repeatable activity that is baselined across the organisation as a whole. The nature of the tool allows reporting by exception to the top team: Who moved up a level in the past month? Why? Which business unit is lagging on the achievement of particular capabilities within the desired time frame? These progress reports become a significant leading indicator of future business performance.
The HCCEM™ is already helping numerous organisations to deliver their transformation projects more effectively and efficiently. Each implementation builds upon the significant volume of work that already underpins the model, delivering maximum results for a minimal investment. If you would like to see how the HCCEM™ can help accelerate your transformation effort, please contact us.


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