It's time for your health check of your Oracle Cloud transformation

With any large business transformation programme, it’s important to take a moment to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going. Of course, digital transformation programmes can be rewarding and deliver business value, including competitive advantage, increased agility, greater customer satisfaction, lower costs, higher productivity and more. 

These digital transformation programmes also require a lot of resources. Too often, digital transformation is seen as a simple system replacement – when in fact, the business and technology must change in tandem. This misconception is likely a key reason why an estimated 75% of digital transformations fail, and those that do fail, 70% are the result of user adoption and behavioural change.

Three common pitfalls and how to avoid them

In our years of running implementation health checks for Oracle clients, some issues crop up time and again. So, we’ll leave you with three examples of common pitfalls clients face, and how to avoid them.

1. The biggest single issue concerns the business case. Any ERP transformation or system implementation should have a business case that addresses specified value drivers, demonstrates a clear path to ROI, and has buy-in from the relevant stakeholders. Without this, it’s extremely difficult to maintain momentum and a consistent direction throughout the multi-year programme, particularly if there’s a change in leadership.

2. Another common challenge is limited stakeholder engagement. It’s vital to make clear from the outset that the programme will require several waves of change throughout the company - it’s not just IT replacing/upgrading a legacy system. The programme must involve the right people to ensure that change is properly propagated throughout the organisation. These stakeholders need to include people from the business who understand the value drivers, sign off on the business case, enforce proper governance, and give the transformation programme the attention it deserves.

3. The other frequent issue is misalignment between business processes and technology. In many cases, clients are replacing an older ERP put in 15 years ago, so it’s worth evaluating the business model and switching to current best practices, rather than simply transferring outdated processes and business requirements from the old system into the new one. Aligning with the latest business processes for your industry upfront helps you maximise ROI from your investment in Oracle and future-proof your business, because it enables you to avoid unnecessary customisation, save money and accept new software releases as the SaaS offerings evolve.

All of these pitfalls share one common trait: It’s much easier to slip into them if the project team lacks expertise in business transformation.

A health check for transformation programmes

We’ve developed a robust, tried-and-tested method to help clients ensure their Oracle transformations deliver the desired objectives. How? By providing a “health check” – an unbiased expert assessment of the transformation programme, identifying any issues and giving you actionable recommendations to resolve them. A health check is particularly valuable for clients who have niggling doubts about the direction and progress of their Oracle transformation, a disconnect between business and IT stakeholders, or lack of executive engagement.

Here’s how it works. Typically, clients come to us when they see some red flags in an Oracle implementation that they’re conducting internally or with one or more system integrators. For example, that might be a high number of issues or change requests. But at any point in the project, a health check evaluates the current situation and recommends the best way to address any problems and deliver a high-quality outcome. This helps the business receive a healthy return on its investment.

Next, we conduct a health check of the transformation programme in three stages:

1. We evaluate the programme’s starting plan, strategic vision and other important documents

2. We conduct interviews with business and IT stakeholders and validate our findings and observations from the data and documents provided

3. We develop recommendations showing how to get the implementation back on track, while making the most of the prior investment. 

We tailor each health check to the scope and status of the transformation programme and the client’s concerns. The areas covered usually include programme governance and methodology, value realisation, solution scope and design, business and IT readiness, and the deployment roadmap. We provide a fresh, objective perspective on the direction and progress in each area. And we bring in specialists for each part of the assessment, forming teams that are truly greater than the sum of their parts.

The results are fast, with a rapid health check taking approximately three weeks. Many clients then choose to extend this by six to eight weeks so that we can run a deeper-dive assessment of the “problem areas” identified. At the end of the health check, we deliver our fresh, independent view of the transformation programme in a report for the board or executive committee.

Interested?

A health check is a sensible step to take before, during or after an Oracle transformation. It helps you ensure that the programme is on track and that you’re asking the right things of your implementation partner. And it’s tailored to your project scope, status and business needs.

If you’re interested in getting an expert, unbiased assessment of your Oracle transformation, please get in touch.