How do you orchestrate reasonable implementation times at your organization?
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By setting and aligning on rationalized expectations with your stakeholders. It’s easier to build out an agile roadmap based on technical LOE, but often things like natural capacity constraints (such as critical business stakeholders are focused on quarter-end, cross-functional teams aren’t dedicated and have competing priorities, etc.) aren’t taken into consideration or anticipated up front.
I've led implementations at enterprise-sized companies and different stages and sizes of startups. The struggle is: What is the right amount of time? Salesforce is a common CRM platform used across both large enterprises and the mid-market space. There's a standard out-of-the-box functionality and the implementation timeframe for a basic execution is about the same, but the business drivers look very different.
How do we approach that to make sure we're defining the right success criteria accordingly? That's the challenge in terms of setting expectations about how quickly we can bring in technology to support the business’s needs and understanding processes which will be in various stages of maturation.
It's easy when you were born in the cloud and you have that flexibility, but when it comes to having that technical debt or a lot of brownfield applications, there is no hope in taking a mainframe and moving it to the cloud as-is. You need to make changes or deconstruct it in some way.
We get ahead of the curve by drinking our own champagne - intelligent automation. While I have seen more mature companies start with process optimization and then automating manual work. New-age start-ups adopt new technology because of the demand and a need to ramp up quickly. <br><br>While automation can indeed be an answer to meet escalated expectations, we approach this by understanding the type of implementation (out of box vs. custom). Then, we assess the number of people involved (in other words, a dedicated team). Lastly, we deep dive into how we can automate - migration, integration, deployment, and ongoing operations, which helps align timelines.
By looking at the skillset in the implementation team, how much time they have and on what other projects they are working, how much time similar projects took in the past. Sometimes I get input from the vendor or a peer from similar size business that has implemented the same technology/project