A quick scan through the original blueprint of Programme Phakamisa indicates a well-planned, large-scale systems development undertaking:
- Clear business objectives and well-defined value chains;
- A phased roll-out targeting low transaction regions of the city and initially excluding platinum clients;
- Great emphasis on change management to ensure readiness by impacted employees to adopt new business processes. The programme had, at one stage, a change management work stream headed by an Organisational Transformation Programme Manager; and
- Visible senior managerial support, judging from various articles in the public domain.
So why do programmes such as City of Joburg’s Phakamisa get delivered so painfully and why do they deliver lower than expected results?
The key is in the complexity of the design of the new system. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations are usually ambitious because they integrate a lot of legacy systems, each with dirty data and complex spaghetti code that is hard to follow. Naturally, complex systems are hard to test and are very difficult to de-bug. Due to time pressures, the interface development is signed-off with the hope that user testing will be extensive and will uncover all the bugs. Unfortunately, major bugs uncovered too late in the programme are even harder to resolve.
No amount of change management and business process training can help a highly complex system that is performing against what the user expects.
The city's head of finance, Parks Tau, was quoted by Timeslive (26 January 2010) as saying that the IT project is completed and that problems are interface-related. But the system includes all interfaces. So if the interfaces are not working, then the system is not working.
A lot is written about ways of ensuring successful IT implementations, including change control processes, project management skills, technical skills, executive support, change management, poor planning, poor decision-making and roll-out approach.
For enterprise-wide implementations such as Programme Phakamisa, in addition to the above, upfront preparatory work is very key. This should be business-led and should cover two items: simplification of existing business processes and cleaning up of data.
Completing these two major exercises ahead of an ERP system implementation will ensure that organisations are much more prepared to take on a more complex ERP programme. More importantly, the pressure on the ERP implementation team to work on highly inefficient business processes and to complete data clean-up is eased. The result is simplified processes, well-understood data, more knowledgeable business resources and a less painful and costly implementation. The upfront business programme should receive just as much executive support and should be managed on sound programme management principles, but it can be completed over many months by a number of independent consultants and business resources, as opposed to during an ERP implementation that has even tighter timelines and that brings in expensive resources.
An organisation that cannot simplify their business processes and cannot cleanup their data (and keep it that way) should perhaps think twice about taking up a complex ERP implementation.
Tumi Mphahlele is Managing Director: Busara Strategic Projects, a division of Busara Leadership Partners ( www.busaraleadershippartners.co.za )
