Implementing Business Software - NO it is not a 'Quick Fix'

It wasn't long ago that we were sitting in our office, keeping track of all our clients with excel spreadsheets, client manila folders and yes – post its! Construction Schedules were written out in our project managers notebooks, and our outlook calendar was filled with reminders of who to call and when.  It certainly functioned, and we had clients who were thrilled, gorgeous projects and happy staff. However, you’d hear the tales of how business software (CRM, ERP, MAP, PIM etc.) can transform your business, increase client satisfaction and profitability. How introducing software can allow visibility into the customer relationships, business metrics, and workflow touch points, while improving sales productivity and predictability. All while walking the dog and making dinner (Okay...that was just a hope).  The truth is, in my experience, it truly is capable of all that.

 Nonetheless, a software systems itself doesn't truly transform anything. It is simply just a tool which provides us with powerful insight into our business. What truly changes business performance are the behaviour changes in your people and the process improvements enabled by the software system. I like girly sports metaphors...so bear with me. Buying a CRM or similar software is like purchasing a world class Belgian Warmblood Thoroughbred. I am not going to immediately become an Olympic Show Jumper. In fact, I likely won’t even become a better rider. With this in mind, implementing a software solution for your business is not going to magically make your business more profitable or successful nor will it make you better in business. Instead, if your business doesn't have the potential to really perform optimality, it is simply going to expose the weaknesses allowing you to realize your business potential.

All things considered, two of our core values are to be humble and to embrace innovation and change; so we embarked on the challenge of implementing a software program that we felt would optimize our ability to improve our product and service. It has been a long and ongoing process, and I have learned many valuable lessons about organizational change;

YOU CANNOT FORCE CHANGE

At the end of the day, change is extremely hard for most people. It literally goes against our hard-wiring. Change is never entirely foreseeable and brings the possibility of worse, and we certainly want to avoid ‘worse’. So 9 times out of 10, your employees aren't thrilled with any operational or procedural ‘shift’.

YOU NEED TO SELL & MARKET OPERATIONAL SHIFTS INTERNALLY

Yes. I had to purposely shift out of my analytical side of my brain and turn on my inner sales persona and contribute to selling the vision to our people. We exhaustively repeated and communicated the vision of a more efficient workday, and happy clients on a daily basis.   

LEADERSHIP NEEDS TO SET THE EXAMPLE

In order for your people to change, they need to feel like they need to. We are only moved to change when an outside force moves us to. That outside force is the un-comfortableness we feel when we know that we need to act. We believe action is required and therefore we act. If we don’t feel the need to act, then 9 times out of 10 - we won’t. Resistance to change occurs when there is an opportunity to stay put - a low level of apparent ‘need’. This is entirely a direct result of a management team that is not constantly reinforcing the vision and therefore the ‘need’.

STUBBORNNESS SOMETIMES PAYS OFF

I have certainly been accused of being stubborn. I blame it on a science pedigree. I will literally try a thousand different ways to achieve an end result. If my optimal result has not been realized, I am just hard-wired to keep trying different formulas. Two years later,  we are still working and re-working how our software integration is going to work the best within our business operation. Some may call that foolish – but change is fluid, and to try to apply a static framework to it seems naive.  

On the whole, metrics speak for themselves. After integrating and deploying new software you need to re-measure performance and validate your business case. Through implementation we identified many deficiencies in the consistency of our process, and have repaired them to ensure all our clients, trades and supply partners receive a consistent experience with us. The journey is far from over and we will stubbornly update the roadmap, routinely, to ensure we are consistently optimizing the teams’ potential.